Previews in Info Panel of Office Documents Don't Work

[freecicero]

Hello and thanks for your work on this flatpack. I notice that the Info Panel on the right does not show previews of Microsoft Word and Excel files -- it shows just a dummy image. Is there a way to get this feature functioning? - THANK YOU

[tsdgeos]

I don't actually have any Word or Excel file around to try, could you please attach one of each?

[freecicero]

Thank you I would be glad to. Attached are two very simple samples. My understanding of getting this preview to work in the normal KDE desktop is that there are apparently some preview formats installed when you install Calligra, so perhaps there are some kind of filter files that can be lifted from there. Calligra has the ability to preview Word and Excel documents, both in the older doc / xls format and the newer docx / xlsx format, and that is critically important for use of Dolphin in a modern office situation. If there is anything you can do to get this working it would be great -- thank you!!!! I know that previewing these documents is possible in the latest distros such as Kde neon, Kubuntu, Manjaro, etc.

Also, I am concerned that preview of PDF files does not work either, and that is equally or even more important.

Even if you had to include a version of Calligra or Okular within the flatpak to get these file previews working, it would be worth it for lots of users. Having the information panel on the right be able to display these formats has been a basic function of WIndows Explorer for many years, and in my view this is just SO important for use of linux in an office environment.

again - thank you!

Sample Spreadsheet and Word Document.zip

[tsdgeos]

Calligra is a very poor office suite

I would appreciate if you did not use such language here. You may not like Calligra, keep it to yourself, or for when someone asks your opinion, there's no need to belittle work done by fellow colleagues of the Free Software community.

[freecicero]

Sorry! I had no intention of belittling Calligra and I have edited the message. KDE and all its components are a treasure for humanity and they deserve great credit for all their work.

Here is a graphic of how the preview works in Dolphin using Gecko / Opensuse Tumbleweed with the latest KDE. This is a DOC file, but it should also provide previews like this for Excel files and PDF documents. This functionality did not exist when I first installed Gecko, but as soon as I installed Calligra (not sure which Calligra files did this) Dolphin gave the ability to preview almost double the previous file types (in the "Configure Dolphin / Previews" panel). This functionality is, to my knowledge, unique in the Linux world and is one of the main reasons to use Dolphin in an office environment rather than one of the many other file managers.

[tsdgeos]

Yes, there's quite a few thumbnail creators in calligra, and a few more in other places we don't include either.

Needs evaluating on whether we can include them all or if we can use the magic flatpak plugin system https://lxr.kde.org/search?_filestring=&_string=%3DThumbCreator

[tsdgeos]

Tracking/discussin it upstream https://invent.kde.org/teams/flathub/issues/-/issues/5

[freecicero]

Thank you very much for checking into this! I realize that at some point it is impractical and inappropriate to intergrate into a Dolphin flatpak all of the various services with which it might integrate, but the core viewer functionality is really a killer feature and really puts Dolphin at the head of the pack of all linux file managers for office use.