bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[N. Jackson]

tags 21331 notabug
stop

At 14:26 -0300 on Monday 2015-08-24, Glenn Morris wrote:

> I guess this is related to mailcap. Examine your /etc/mailcap file and
> the value of Emacs's mailcap-mime-data.

Thanks Glenn, you are quite right.

And it's right there in the manual at (info "(gnus) Using MIME"):

       The following commands are available when you have placed point over
    a MIME button:

    ‘RET (Article)’
    ‘BUTTON-2 (Article)’
         Toggle displaying of the MIME object (‘gnus-article-press-button’).
         If built-in viewers can not display the object, Gnus resorts to
         external viewers in the ‘mailcap’ files.

    ...

I had searched the manual for "attachment" instead of for "MIME" which
was why I missed it.

It turns out that I had the line

    application/msword; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

in my mailcap file and that was causing the behaviour I observed. I
guess I mis-remembered that other Microsoft Office documents were opened
correctly from Gnus (or perhaps that was on another system).

For completeness, I can report that with the following lines in my
/etc/mailcap

    application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.database; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

    application/msword; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.ms-excel; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.ms-powerpoint; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.ms-access; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

    application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; 
/usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation; 
/usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet; 
/usr/bin/xdg-open %s

all of .odt, .ods, .odp, .odb, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .docx, .xlsx, .pptx
files now open as desired in LibreOffice. (I was unable to test with
.mdb files as I don't have a program on my system that will open them.)

So not a bug.

Sorry for the noise.