Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 7, Terminal Empowerment

#54 View Word and PDF Files from Within Mutt

HACK

HACK

#54

View Word and PDF Files from Within Mutt Hack #54

View Microsoft Word documents and PDF files you receive as attachments in

email right inside the email client as part of the body of the message.

Mutt is an extremely powerful terminal-based email client that supports

IMAP, POP, and much more. No graphical email client can come close to

the configurability of Mutt. That’s why a lot of hard-core Linux users still

use Mutt in spite of the myriad GUI-based email clients.

It is certainly possible to launch a GUI application such as OpenOffice.org

or Acrobat Reader to view Word and PDF email attachments in Mutt. But

Mutt users aren’t always using a graphical desktop, so it’s handy to be able

to view these documents as text, right inside the message itself.

Here’s how to do it. First, you need to edit the Mutt configuration file. The

default configuration file is usually /etc/Muttrc, but you’ll most likely want to

create your own even if you do it by copying the default and modifying it.

Mutt lets you define your user configuration file as either ~/.muttrc or ~/.mutt/

muttrc. Modify your personal Mutt configuration file to point to a custom

mailcap file. For example:

set mailcap_path="~/mailcap.mutt"

Figure 7-4. A PDF file shown in elinks

View Word and PDF Files from Within Mutt #54

Chapter 7, Terminal Empowerment ...