Hi guys, first post here. I got the Falkon browser as part of an overdue Linux distro upgrade a couple of days ago and am generally pleased with it – the removal of ads is a huge benefit. I have a simple problem which I assumed I’d be able to fix in 30 seconds, but it has so far defeated both the Falkon help pages and DuckDuckGo. (It has an odd Netscape/1993 aspect – sorry if anyone is groaning and rolling their eyes.)
Falkon seems to use the old-fashioned “helper app” concept, and my copy sends the PDFs it encounters to Gimp, probably my least-favourite graphics app of all time.
I can of course download the files, launch Okular and print them off, but it would be much better if I could instruct Falkon to use Okular as its helper. I looked in the Downloads manager and some other spots in Preferences, but Falkon’s developers don’t think the way I do.
If what you are looking for is to have your PDF download embeded into the Falkon window I don’t believe Okular will do that. Falkon SHOULD though prompt you to either download or open the file. If you open and Okular is set as the main application for PDF’s it will open.
As for Falkons use of a PDF plugging what they have appears to be broken at this time.
I just did a bit more research into this, some testing and verifying.
I was able to get an embeded PDF to work with Falkon but only locally meaning a PDf that I had downloaded from the internet was able to open in Falkon. If the PDF is coming from an URL pdf.js doesn’t seem to support that.
Hi Cthulhu, thanks, and I hope this late response doesn’t invite retribution from you or any other elder gods. (I had flu.)
You didn’t give me what I wanted yet, although you came close. Reading back over your replies, I realize that I expected the “helper app” concept to be self-explanatory. It may not be, if you weren’t heavily involved in the web in the mid-90s. Let me describe in more detail.
I really like Falkon, but not its inbuilt PDF viewer, which I checked out when I first installed the application. Instead, when Falkon hits a PDF, I want it to pass that file directly to Okular. I don’t mind if Falkon shows a “save or open” dialog but, if it does, I’ll click straight through it and engage with the PDF in Okular.
In your first message, you say “If you open and Okular is set as the main application for PDF’s it will open”, but you don’t say whether that setting is made in Falkon or at a system-wide level.
It’s probably worth mentioning here that my relationship with Falkon and KDE is likely to be different from yours. I encountered Falkon a couple of weeks ago as one of the recommended installs in an update of Q4OS. As you may know, Q4OS is a lightweight Linux distro that uses the Trinity window manager, a fork of an old KDE version with a minimal control interface. Thsu my relationship with KDE is pretty tenuous. I don’t have any objection to wrangling KDE/Trinity but I’d have thought that the configuration I describe would best be effected at application level.
Hello guys, I’m guessing that someone will turn up this thread looking for support on this issue. I have advanced from “how do I do this?” to the “why doesn’t this work?” stage. Further comments welcome.
Background: I don’t normally have to engage much with KDE because the default configurations in my Q4OS distro have worked well. However, the latest OS update put the Falkon browser on my desktop, and that threw up an issue with the handling of PDF files.
Falkon has an inbuilt PDF viewer which works OK. If, like me, you prefer to use an external PDF viewer, the integration is not seamless.
In Falkon you can go into the Settings/Preferences and uncheck the option to use the inbuilt PDF viewer, prompting KDE to consider its repertoire of file associations and – in theory – call up whatever PDF viewer you have configured.
You do that by going into any window of the Konqueror file manager, selecting “Settings/Configure Konqueror…” and then editing the appropriate File associations entry. This last involves a rather complex series of subdialogs but the logic is clear enough. I did the obvious, indicating that my first-choice PDF app is Okular, my second-choice is the Document Viewer and so on.
Unfortunately, despite this Falkon/KDE/Q4OS persists in opening all PDFs in TheGimp, probably my least favourite graphics program of all time and a very poor choice indeed for PDF viewing. I suspect that something basic is amiss here: would appreciate input.
If the link is to a pdf, I have no issue with Falkon opening it in a new tab, if I right click, and select save link as, Falkon gives me the option to open the file which then opens in Okular (which is my default pdf reader set in Plasma), or save file.
Thanks guys. As per my earlier post: I’m running the variant of the Q4OS distro which uses Trinity (old fork of KDE) for windowing. I checked through the Trinity settings and can’t see any direct equivalent to the Plasma “Default PDF viewer” option which you so carefully screenshot for me. I had assumed that my question was about Falkon but it actually seems to be about Q4OS, or at least Trinity. I will redirect it to the Q4OS forum, unless anyone using Falkon on Trinity wants to step up?
