Bug#1004711: gimp uses ebook-viewer (from calibre package) for print preview

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 01 Feb 2022 at 12:58:00 -0500, Eric Cooper wrote:
> I purged calibre and tried the print preview again. Oddly, gimp still did not
> use mupdf, it used itself: it popped up the "import pdf" dialog for the pdf it
> was going to print, and opened a new (gimp) window for it.

That sounds like the default behaviour of the mime-apps spec when not
given any particular preference for a PDF viewer: look at all the apps that
could possibly open a PDF, and choose one essentially at random. You would
probably get the same result by clicking on a PDF file in a file manager.

I would guess that the configured print preview command is probably
something that implements the mime-apps spec, like xdg-open, 'gio open'
or similar.

>     You can configure the preferred PDF viewer for each user via
>     ~/.config/mimeapps.list, or system-wide via /etc/xdg/mimeapps.list.
> 
>     In a well-integrated desktop environment ...

If you're using a specific desktop environment, then
that desktop environment should be installing its own
opinionated, per-desktop-environment configuration in
/usr/share/applications/$desktop-mimeapps.list, like GNOME does.
Which desktop environment are you using?

Or if you've made your own desktop environment out of individual
components, then configuring a preferred handler for any particular file
format (if more than one is available) is up to you.
Try ~/.config/mimeapps.list, or your file manager or your desktop
environment's settings app (if any) might have a graphical way to achieve
the same result.

It's difficult to set defaults in a desktop-environment-agnostic way in a
distribution as diverse as Debian without getting extremely political,
because everyone has their own opinions about which web browser,
PDF viewer, etc. should be the preferred one.

    smcv