Viewing A Textual PDF In Mutt

Posted in: technology. Tagged: linux, mutt, pdf

I think there must be something wrong with me. Why, in this age of graphical user interfaces, does it delight me so much that I can view textual PDFs within Mutt (on a remote server without a gui)?

To set this up, you need to install pdftotext. This application is available in either poppler-utils or xpdf-utils - most people seem to use the latter, but I suspect the former is probably a better option for a text-only server. I installed poppler-utils.

Next create (or edit) the ~/.mailcap file, so that it has the following line:

application/pdf;                pdftotext -layout %s -; copiousoutput

You could also add the line:

text/html;                      elinks %s; nametemplate=%s.html`

The latter line opens HTML attachments in elinks.

Then just hit “V” when viewing an email, and you will see the attachments, select the attachment and hit Enter to view it. Awesome :)