I recently found out that Nautilus (Ubuntu 12.04 at least) can show thumbnails of files of non-image formats, for example (data grapher) grace
files (.agr
) shows a small version of the graph contained in its data. Obviously, there some library or script that is processing the file, making the image, and allowing nautilus to show a small version of it.
This made me think that in principle any file that potentially can be processed into an image can serve as a Nautilus thumbnail.
For example, a .tex
file (which can be converted to .pdf
) or a gnuplot script can be displayed as a thumbnail when possible.
In the case of .tex
file, the correspoding .pdf can be created by the command pdflatex file.tex
.
The question is, how can I tell Nautilus to create a thumbnail for an arbitrary format and how do I specify the commands to do so within Nautilus?
Update 2014,
I still didn't manage to preview anything with the answer posted, I created this script in /usr/bin/tex-thumbnailer
:
pdflatex $1
convert -density 300 ${1%.*}.pdf -resize 25% $2
and a file /usr/share/thumbnailers/tex.thumbnailer
:
[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=tex-thumbnailer
Exec=tex-thumbnailer %u %o
MimeType=text/x-tex;
I can't make nautilus to generate/show the preview even for simple TeX files. I don't know what I am doing wrong.