Arch Linux

1202

Member

Registered: 2018-01-12

Posts: 5

GNOME Documents is not showing LibreOffice previews

I have GNOME with GNOME Documents and LibreOffice (fresh, so 7.0) installed. But when I want to preview a .doc or .xls file in GNOME Documents, it says:

'LibreOffice support is not available'

The details are:

(org.gnome.Documents:36358): Gjs-WARNING **: 11:41:28.450: JS ERROR: Unable to load document: Gio.IOErrorEnum: Internal error: LibreOffice isn't available

Researching this issue, I found out that apparently 'LOKDocView' is responsible for the preview. It wraps the LibreOffice functionality into an API. It seems to depend on (according to this source and this one):
1. a .gir file
2. a .typelib file
3. liblibreofficekitgtk.so being in path

3. I could verify was not the case, at least it was in /usr/lib and that was not in my path. With that sorted, I went looking for the .gir and .typelib files, which should be in /usr/share/gir-1.0 and $libdir/girepository-1.0 respectively. Neither exists.

So I could continue and try to generate the .gir and .typelib files myself - which might mean compiling LibreOffice from source - so LOKDocView and subsequently GNOME Documents could do their thing. But I have the feeling this stuff should work out of the box and there might simply be some package or setting missing. Also, it might be possible LibreOffice fresh does not match with GNOME Documents (3.34.0) and I should switch to the stable branch of LibreOffice.

Does anyone encounter the same issue? Only thing relevant on this forum I found is this post. But that's a few years old, and installing the SDK does not make any difference.

derkardinal

Member

Registered: 2019-01-01

Posts: 1

Re: GNOME Documents is not showing LibreOffice previews

I can confirm this issue.