abiword (and other text editing apps) should not appear in the Open With menu for PDFs

looks like a bug.

Do you have the abiword-plugins installed?

Oops, almost overlooked this.

Hubert:
No I don't have abiword-plugins installed.

then AbiWord try to open the PDF as text file which is bad. But why is PDF assigned to AbiWord?

install abiword-plugins as a work around.

I can confirm this bug, and abiword-plugins renders PDFs _horribly_ (at least on AMD64).

Don't expect miracles for PDF import.

Perhaps this "feature" should be disabled until it works correctly, then. Because right now, its abysmal.

> But why is PDF assigned to AbiWord?

This is strange. I poked about in /usr/share/applications and the abiword.desktop doesn't list pdf. Looking at Open With again also shows gvim and gedit in the list of programs PDFs can be opened with too.

There is something that all three share in common: in
/usr/share/application-registry
They all have mime_types=text/* . Are PDFs counted as being a subtype of text?

And lo, after plenty of searching I have turned up
  <mime-type type="application/postscript">
    <sub-class-of type="text/plain"/>
inside
/usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml

Hmm after perusing that file some more I found postscript and pdf appear to be misclassified.

I think you can just about make the case for RTF being a subtype of text/plain given that you read it when you strip away the markup in a text viewer like vi. However binary formats like application/pdf and application/postscript are no more readable in a text viewer than a binary MSWord 6 document (and Word documents aren't a subtype of text/plain).

With that part tracked down I guess we are left with whether abiword should cope better with binary files being parsed as text... Since it can't actually display a binary file that contains text perhaps it would be better if it popped up a warning when such files were opened?

OpenOffice Writer actually pops up a "parse as" list when given a document it can't identify and setting the parse format to text resulted in the document being loaded in 5 seconds (of course it looked a mess and had lots of black diamonds in it). The same document doesn't finish loading in abiword after 5 minutes...

I think there is a bug upstream for that. If not, please file one.

re: sucks CPU when opening unknown file format

It looks a lot like http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10187 (I'm rather pleased this part had already been reported because I'm loathe to create new bug tracking system accounts - I'm on enough of them already...). I'll retitle and reword this launchpad bug to cover only the mimetype issue.

Hubert:

Do you want to reject this bug against the abiword product?

There is definitely a bug in upstream.

> There is definitely a bug in upstream

For what? The freedesktop "incorrect PDF subclass" problem or the abiword "CPU eating on unknown file" issue?

#2. The bug as originally supported.

pdf is not a subclass of text, that change has been backported wrongly from the CVS with a patch, will be fixed with next upload

fixed for dapper:

 shared-mime-info (0.17-0ubuntu11) dapper; urgency=low
 .
   * debian/patches/170_mime_subclassing.patch:
     - pdf is not a subclass of text (Ubuntu: #44523)

I now longer see the originally described bug (abiword and other text apps appear in open with menu for PDFs) under Gutsy. Should the abiword component simply be marked invalid?

closing the task then, feel free to reopen if you get the issue again though