Documents as Text

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XeFM’s viewer shows what a document says: the text of PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument and EPUB files, with their headings, lists, tables, pages, slides and sheets. You can search it, select and copy it, and wrap it to the window, even when the file is on a server or inside an archive.

The old Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) are not read. They open in their applications as before.

Opening one

Enter or File → View File (view_file) on the file opens it in the viewer. A large or remote document first shows a progress dialog while it is read. Esc stops the reading.

The viewer has two modes, as for Markdown files. M (toggle_view_mode) switches between them, and XeFM remembers your choice for each kind of file:

• Rendered (the first time): headings, lists, tables, and a heading for each page, slide, sheet or chapter.
• Text: the plain text, line by line, as search sees it.

Search (isearch), selection and copy work in both. The header names the document kind and its size, for example “PowerPoint · 12 slides”.

What you see, and what you don’t

The viewer shows the text, not the page. Layout, fonts, pictures and charts are not drawn. To see what a document looks like, open it in its application with File → Open with Default App (open_with_os).

• A scanned PDF has no text, only a picture of each page. The viewer says so instead of showing an empty page. XeFM does no OCR.
• A password-protected PDF isn’t opened. The viewer says so, and the application can open it.
• A PDF gives the text of each page in reading order. A PDF does not record headings or tables as such, so none are shown.
• Spreadsheet cells show the values they hold. A date shows as the number Excel stores for it.

Searching inside documents

View → Search Content… (find_in_files) reads these documents through the same text, so a word in a PDF or a slide deck is found like a word in a text file. Each hit shows its line of the extracted text.

If viewing still opens Preview or Word

XeFM’s shipped configuration sends view_file on these files to the built-in viewer. A config.py created before this feature still says otherwise, and it wins. Change the 'view' of the PDF and Office entries in FILE_ASSOCIATIONS to None:

{
    'pattern': '*.pdf',
    'open': ['open', '-a', 'Preview'],
    'view': None,           # V: XeFM's own viewer
    'edit': None,
},

Enter already uses the built-in viewer, whatever 'view' says.

Keys depend on your keymap preset — see Keymap Presets.

Requirements

Reading documents uses doc-files, with pypdf for PDF. Both come with XeFM.