Subject: bug#20891: emacs: Back off if .doc is not an Office document

From: era <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Nov 2019 10:29:15 +0200

On Thu, Nov 7, 2019, at 06:45, Richard Stallman wrote:
>   > So, as long as we lack editing capabilities, showing an image of the
>   > document in Emacs is actually pretty useful.
> How would Emacs do that?

The Emacs-side entry point seems to be doc-view-mode-maybe, which is hooked in auto-mode-alist for a number of file name extensions.

As described in https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DocViewMode it relies on external utilities to provide the actual image.

I was unable to quickly repro in a fresh Debian or Ubuntu image, but that might be because I didn't have the external utility installed.

Tangentially, googling for doc-view-mode-maybe suggests that lots of people are annoyed by it and want to turn it off, probably often for related but distinct reasons.

-- 
If this were a real .signature, it would suck less.  Well, maybe not.