[tex-live] texdoc question

[Joel C. Salomon]

On 12/27/2011 06:56 PM, Philipp Stephani wrote:
> 2011/12/27 tobig <hangontheglock at yahoo.de>:
>> Am 27.12.2011 um 20:59 schrieb Joel C. Salomon:
>>> What is the mechanism that TeXdoc uses to open (say) PDF files with
>>> the system default viewer?  On my Ubuntu system, this has stopped
>>> working, instead opening with Nautilus (the file manage) the directory
>>> in which the PDF file lives.
>>
>> try texdoc -v latex (or sth else)
>>
>> It will give you some Information about the string, which is handed
>> to the shell. I have no Ubuntu running in the moment but my Mac says
>> "texdoc info: View comand: open "path/to/manual""
> 
> On Gnome, texdoc is supposed to call gnome-open, which uses Gnome's
> file associations. So "texdoc -v" should print something like
> "gnome-open /path/to/file.pdf". Maybe the association between PDF
> files and your viewer is broken.

It calls xdg-open (which presumably calls gnome-open behind the scenes
on my Gnome machine, and some other program on a KDE box, etc.).  File
associations *seemed* to work; double-clicking a PDF file in Nautilu
opened it up in Acrobat Reader.  It was xdg-open that wasn't working right.

And that was the bit of information I was missing.  A bit of Googling,
and it seems having XFCE installed can play games with *-open.  I'd
installed it to look at and wasn't using it anymore, so I removed XFCE
and everything works again.

Thanks for the help.

--Joel