Opening pdf attachment from mail client not working

[Claudio Clemens]

2006-11-30, 17:19 +0100, Luqman:
> > ben darby wanted us to know:
> 
> >* Luqman wrote:
> >> mail client: mutt
> >> 
> >> I have problem opening pdf files directory from my mail client. Saving
> >> pdf attachments and then opening works fine.
> >> 
> >> Mail client shows following mime type for the attachment:
> >> 
> >> [-- Typ: application/pdf, Kodierung: base64, Größe: 130K --]
> >> 
> >> $mypc:> cat /etc/mailcap | grep pdf
> >> application/pdf; evince '%s'; test=test -n "$DISPLAY" ; nametemplate=%s.pdf
> >> 
> >> I am clueless. Can someone give an advice...
> >
> >is evince in your terminals path? try using its full path
> >/usr/bin/evince & try opening it with 'm' in the attachments section to
> >force the viewing with mailcap, other than that im not sure as it works
> >fine here.
> >
> 
> It seems to be a subtle problem. I have a pdf attachment that is being
> recognized as pdf:
> 
> [-- Anhang #2: nssim.pdf --]
> [-- Typ: application/pdf, Kodierung: base64, Größe: 368K --]
> 
> Another pdf attachment is seen as an octet-stream in mutt:

I bet this attachment can be viewed without problems

> [-- Anhang #2: spectsFinal.pdf --]
> [-- Typ: application/octet-stream, Kodierung: base64, Größe: 465K --]

But this one will fail.

> Sometimes pdf files are openend with evince in mutt, and sometimes
> evince opens and shows only empty pages.
> I also observed following error when opening pdf attachments:
> 
> Failed to load document (error 3) 'file:///tmp/overview.pdf'
> 
> I think my system is really broken << Edgy installed. Will try to open
> these email attachments in dapper, that's still installed on my laptop in another
> partition.

Actually the system is broken... but not at your side. The problem is
that, mutt doesn't guess if the attached file is a pdf, or gif, or
whatever. This invormation comes from the mailing Program of the sender.
So if they use a good program, it will write in the mail, that the file
is a pdf "application/pdf". If they use a broken program, it just write
in the Mail, "This is data". "application/octet-stream" can be anything.
So thats why mutt don't know how to handle octet-stream. (or mailcap, or
whatever).

What you can do is: go to the given attachment, and press CTRL+"e",
and edit the Content-Type to a better MIME-Type. In your case just
"application/pdf"

Now you should be able to view the attachment.

HTH,

Claudio
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