Xfce Forum

monkey

Member

Registered: 2009-06-18

Posts: 1

files with .doc extension

I've recently installed xubuntu 9.04, and noticed that xfce seems to treat files with .doc extension as 'plain text document' which they surely not. The problem is if i assign openoffice writer to open them then the same happens to all .txt files that is they also get to be opened by openoffice.

In other words, xfce is is identifying .doc and plain text files as files of the same type, as a result  there seems to be no way to get .txt files to be treated by mousepad and .doc files by openoffice at the same time, it is only either one way or another for both.

This is quite inconvenient, and it never happened in previous releases of xubuntu i've used.

The reason i think the problem is with xfce is that the system itself seems to identify the file type correctly, this is the output of the 'file' command:

oli@cactus:~/Desktop$ file test.doc
test.doc: Microsoft Office Document Microsoft Word Document
oli@cactus:~/Desktop$

and also in my /ect/mime.types  the doc extension (as well as dot) is identified correctly with application/msword.. but in desktop/thunar the .doc files appear as 'plain text document' and i can't find the way to change it..

I asked the question on ubuntu forums but we don't seem to find a solution so far, so i thought i'd try here..

svensson

Member

Registered: 2009-06-06

Posts: 22

Re: files with .doc extension

The solution might be to edit the *.desktop file (example: /usr/share/applications/mousepad.desktop) and the line 'Mimetype=' to suit your needs.

Undundet

Member

Registered: 2009-07-07

Posts: 3

Re: files with .doc extension

there are e-mail that dont get files with no msg inside the e-mail
like if u send only a file u dont get the msg but if u send the file with like sdfgsdfjdsf you get it
so is there a way to send the file with the msg??

MtheF

Member

Registered: 2004-03-21

Posts: 26

Re: files with .doc extension

It is a problem with the extension *.doc because of two things:
In unix-systems often is a text-document and not a ms-word document.
The mimetypes? (in-file identification) for Ms-word-documents are equal to that of other ms-office-documents.

As I understand it the way to solve it (correct) is to check both if it is a ms-office-document and if the extension is doc. It is probably more complex and I don't have a clue how thunar find out file-types.

A quick solution that maybe work: (from http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=60168)
(file location is here for the debian distribution)

in the file /usr/share/mime/packages/kde.xml
comment out the *.doc-row so it looks like

<mime-type type="text/plain"> <!-- As discussed on xdg list, *.doc is needed here for disambiguation -->
    <glob pattern="*.asc"/>
    <glob pattern="*.txt"/>
    <!-- glob pattern="*.doc"/ -->
</mime-type>

And run:

update-mime-database /usr/share/mime/