Chromium and Okular

[Don]

Has anyone discovered a way to bypass Chromium's internal pdf viewer in favor of Okular? I find Okular much easier to work with. I've not been able to find a way to make Chromium think Okular is the default pdf reader.

Thanks.

[claydoh]

There will be a Site Settings option somewhere, you might be able to search for 'pdf' in the browser settings to find it. Not sure the exact location, and it may be under an 'advanced' section. enabling the option to NOT use the built in viewer *should* cause the files to open in your default viewer.

[Don]

Thanks, claydoh. There is such a setting, in advanced options. I had found that. It's under "Site Settings"/Additional Permissions/PDF documents. But the only option is to "Download PDF files instead of automatically opening them in Chrome," which is a toggle switch (that seems to do nothing at all to change the program's behavior; it still opens everything in its own browser.) I was hoping that someone had found a work-around. And perhaps someone will. I'm grateful for your fast response.

[claydoh]

In normal Chrome, toggling the option to ON opens PDF in Okular, for me. I would figure the options would be similar, but I don't have Chromium installed. I wonder if this is particular to it being a Snap, with limited access outside of its sandbox.

[Don]

OMG! That is going to turn out to be the answer. I was under the (mis)impression that only Chromium would work with a Linux OS. So I've now installed Chrome and will import my stuff and then see whether that does it. Claydoh's experience certainly makes it sound like it will. That kangaroo is awesome.

O.K., I was wrong (again). There is, ostensibly, a plugin available on GitHub that makes Okular the default pdf viewer in Chrome, but the build instructions seem to me incomplete. The url for that plugin is https://github.com/jeremysanders/okularplugin

I have read the Readme file, but it leaves me with questions. It says "automoc" is a requirement, but I cannot find that in Synaptic or with apt. It also says kdelibs5-dev is necessary, but I can't find that either. It uses cmake for the installation. I have cmake, but the third step under installation in the Readme doesn't tell me the target for the program. Lastly, it wants a file called libokularplugin.so but that file doesn't exist on my system. (Perhaps proper use of the cmake program generates it, but I may never know.)

Ignorance is not bliss.

[jglen490]

System Settings -> Applications -> File Associations -> Application and select pdf.

You can either remove Chrome from the priority list or just put Okular on top of the priority list.

[Goeroeboeroe]

Also opening a pdf with the application you want won't always work. Quite often a document has the wrong MIME-type. If that's the case, there's a chance another application will open it, or you have to choose an application. You can't do anything about that, because it's an error in the document (or image, or ...).