HOWTO: Embed PDFs with Evince in Mozilla/Firefox

[veritas366]

Anyone know how to get around the mozilla acroread plugin wanting to uninstall mozplugger? I just spent two hours getting mozplugger to play embedded videos with xine (mplayer has never worked for me.) so I don't want to lose mozplugger. I wish firefox had a feature where you simply associate file types...but they don't. So how can I open pdf's I have xpdf and gpdf (or is it gxpdf) and I have acroreader. Anyone know how to edit mozplugger to make the association? Don't care which reader. Thanks.

[tlepes]

The acroread package in the Marillat repo works fine. This guide will tell you how to add it [http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/RestrictedFormats]

If you really wanna use Adobe Reader 7 just install acroread and mozilla-acroread and you'll be in business. I really gotta recommend Evince, it has the ability to search unlike gpdf, and it uses GTK widgets, acroread looked pretty ugly. Acroread is noticably faster on rendering thumbails on some larger PDFS (lots of vector graphics slowed it down a bit for me) but overall I liked Evince better. Hope that helps =)

Here is one very good reason to avoid the official Adobe Acrobat PDF reader and plug-in...

http://helping.net/p2p/AdobeAcrobatSpyingonUsers.html

Grrrr....!!!!!@##@$^%$#*!!!!!!

To reiterate what the author said, "Again, you can't trust software that is not open source."

Peace!
Tim

[Gandalf]

thanks for this nice HOWTO

[veritas366]

I answered my own question by accident. I removed all pdf references in Mozplugger. I tried to add an entry for evince but I'm sure I got the syntax wrong. However, the first time mozilla wanted to open a pdf, it simply asked me what program to use. I chose evnice and didn't have to worry about it after that.

And evince is quite nice...slow if there are lots of thumbnails...but very nice viewer.

[darkmatter]

Works nicely. The only problem i have is the annoying (though brief) flash of the Evince window just as it is getting embedded. Does anyone no a way to fix this?

[rwabel]

nice howto, is it possible to have it asked to open or save. In the case of open it opens in the browser.

[moxfyre]

Thats it! You dont even have to restart your browser. Enjoy.

A great tip, saik0! I now have PDF viewing in firefox, and am a happy camper

Only one thing to add. From the mozplugger man page (my addition in bold):

You have to remove ~/.netscape/plugin-list or ~/.mozilla/pluginreg.dat or ~/.mozilla/firefox/pluginreg.dat
after changing the configuration, or nothing will happen. This is a
Netscape/Mozilla bug, not a MozPlugger bug.

I had this problem! After I installed mozplugger and tweaked its configuration file, NOTHING worked. I had to delete my pluginreg.dat files, and then everything worked perfectly.

[bradroger]

This doesn't work for me. I'm using firefox 1.5...upgraded using the tutorial from these forums. At first it said I was missing a plugin and tried to install acroread. Then I tried renaming the ~/.mozilla/firefox/pluginreg.dat file but then pdf's just gave me a prompt asking me for what program to use and opened in a new window. For now I've reinstalled acroread and it opens embedded again.

[art]

you need to do

sudo cp /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mozplugger.so /opt/firefox/plugins/

and then it should work... Works for me...

[kperkins]

Here is one very good reason to avoid the official Adobe Acrobat PDF reader and plug-in...

http://helping.net/p2p/AdobeAcrobatSpyingonUsers.html

Grrrr....!!!!!@##@$^%$#*!!!!!!

To reiterate what the author said, "Again, you can't trust software that is not open source."

Peace!
Tim

While this is true, the acroread in Breezy (multiverse) has the plugin that lets it do that separated from the acroread program itself, and is a separate install. (Why anyone would want to install it is beyond me, but there it is.