Thunderbird’s built in PDF viewer gets the job done for a quick glance at a PDF but it does become a tab within Thunderbird for which you can’t just separate out nice and cleanly. My PDF viewer of choice has been Okular for some years now as it provides some robust features, like annotations, search, multi-page thumbnails and the like which is what I need when I am going through documents. Using the built-in viewer felt a bit restrictive and I really needed to fix this.
I recently switched to using Thunderbird as my daily driver email and personal information management suite for which it has been working very well for me. I can’t say I have many complaints but further refinement for my unique Desktop Environment taste was yet required.
Bottom Line Up Front: I am grateful for how flexible Thunderbird is for the picky user. The defaults are likely perfect for most but leaving some room for tweaking makes Thunderbird a great choice for me. Adjusting how files and attachments are managed in Thunderbird is very easy but also slightly frustrating.
Frustration: Why Built-in Isn’t Enough
Thunderbird leverages the Firefox technology handling PDFs and it is mostly adequate under most circumstances but there are two specific reasons why this isn’t working for me. For starters, I have a multi monitor setup and I don’t want the PDF I just pulled up to remove my view from my email. The easy fix is to just drag the PDF to a new window but this creates a new window with two tabs, one of which is another email view. Multiple email views are not a bad thing, I use it all the time but I just want the PDF in it’s own window… JUST the PDF.
I much prefer the interface that Okular has over the built in PDF viewer. I often have to make annotations for either sharing with others or for my own purposes, either way, I often need to bust out the virtual-highlighter and note things. I can’t do this in the built in PDF reader.
After doing some web searching, I found that there was a way to change the default applications used by Thunderbird but it isn’t called “default” anything. Searching “pdf” in the “Find in Settings” search did also not locate any settings. The section is called “Files & Attachments”.
Annoyingly, you can’t scroll through the list of content type and by the look of this, you can’t see that PDF is an option, but using the “Filter content types and actions” field, typing “pdf” will present that option.
The Fix: Step-by-Step
If you have spent anytime with Thunderbird, poking at its settings, you are probably already aware of how to get to the settings, but just in case you haven’t, here is the process.
Open Thunderbird > ≡ Menu > Settings > General tab
Either scroll down or use the “Find in Settings” search tool at the top and type in “Files & Attachments”. Long before you get to the end of that quote, this section will have presented itself. Then in the search box in this setting, type in “pdf” to reveal that setting.
Pictured above, you can see that I have already set it to Okular but that was not an option in the dropdown under the actions column.
Preview in Thunderbird is the default option and I wanted Okular, that was not automatically listed but this Microsoft Office 2007 pdf default was an option. If, lets say, I wanted to use another PDF application, I could certainly add it.
To add an application, select Use other… and it will bring up the most worthless of dialog boxes in the Linux Desktop Environment world.
I’m sure some may like this File Picker but it is not good, sorry. Maybe there is a key combination to be able to type in a file path? It’s not evident by the options presented but since I know that Okular is located in /usr/bin/, I had to click to navigate there then scroll down to find Okular. That search function works for only the folder you are in.
Tip: to find the location of your application of choice, go into the terminal and type “which <application name>” to find it. Example:
> which okular
/usr/bin/okularYou can also find this information out from the menu editor. In this case, if I wanted to add PDF Studio to Okular as an option, I could do that by using the clunky file dialog tool and clicking my way to the destination.
Since I am using Okular as my PDF application of choice I now feel as though I have full command of my PDF attachment actions. Thunderbird is one step closer to being the perfect email application.
Final Thoughts
The flexibility that Thunderbird provides under the hood, and the ease of accessing the specific configurations is a nod to the great work of the many people that have put into this application. I have written before of how Thunderbird has really improved many aspects of my productivity and staying organized.
My Okular solution may not be exactly what you want for viewing PDFs as there are other PDF viewers out there. I could make a genuine case with using PDF studio instead of Okular but, for the time being, I am quite content with this as it is. It would be nice if Thunderbird integrated with Plasma a bit better and could provide the different document applications as options but that is not a thing at this time.
If you prefer a different PDF viewer than Okular, what is it? Do you have any specific recommendations? Do you modify any of the other defaults from Files & Attachments?
References
Daily Driving Thunderbird
Thunderbird Email and Productivity
Get openSUSE
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