I have to right click on Document Viewer to open PDF's on an older Linux laptop, but not on this laptop. The laptops are both running Mint 18.3 Cinnamon 64bit

Can't you set the default program (= open with this command)?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'automatically opened' but will assume you mean if you double click on the file you want the document viewer to open the file. To do that you need to set the default program for pdf files. You do that by

1. Right click on any pdf file in the file browser.
2. Select 'Open with' menu entry.
3. Select 'Other application'.
4. Make sure 'Remember this for PDF Documents' is checked.
5. Select the program you want to use.

That sets the default application. This is the procedure to use to set the default application for any file type.

I'm afraid that does not work Aquillator.

So why doesn't it work? What happens when you try to set it up. Without some information no one can help you.

1 members found this post helpful.

Doing exactly what was advised
"1. Right click on any pdf file in the file browser.
2. Select 'Open with' menu entry.
3. Select 'Other application'.
4. Make sure 'Remember this for PDF Documents' is checked.
5. Select the program you want to use."

As soon as I selected "Make this default", the darkened section of "Make this default", returned to highlight Image Magick, which never opens anything.
So each time I want to open with Document Viewer or ANYTHING else, it bounces back to Image Magick.

What do you use for pdfs on that?

I have never seen that happen before. Something is seriously misconfigured somewhere. The only thing I can suggest is to purge ImageMagick and try to set the default again to see what happens. Then you can reinstall ImageMagick and see if anything changes. I honestly don't think that will fix the problem but it is at least worth a try and is easy to do.

1 members found this post helpful.

Any lines I can input to the terminal to rectify this.

agillator Thank you! I rid myself of Image Magic and all is well.
Cheers

Nice one.

If you want to, you can mark this thread "Solved" (see "Thread Tools" at the top of the thread).

For anybody who's running Firefox, and using the last Linux release of Adobe's 'Reader' (Reader 9), you can also set this to automatically open PDFs clicked on in the browser.

Reader 9 is a few years old, it's true, but is still a very competent piece of software. It comes with a wee script which, when executed, will 'fetch' a download from Adobe's servers (via wget) & install a plug-in to the Firefox browser. This plug-in, when any PDF file is clicked, on any web-page, will automatically fire-up Reader 9, and display the file there, ready for editing if so desired.


Mike.