Arch Linux

ajatashatru

Member

Registered: 2020-05-14

Posts: 8

playing embedded audio in a PDF in arch

Greetings!
Trying to read a PDF with audio file embedded. Evince doesn't read it and firefox gives message:This PDF document contains forms, the filling of form fields is not supported? Does this mean built in PDF viewer does NOT support viewing/playing embedded files? If so, what are my options (than downloading and using bloated acroread?) Evince also doesn't play! Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance.

fistrosan

Member

Registered: 2020-04-01

Posts: 171

Re: playing embedded audio in a PDF in arch

Your problem is not really with arch, but rather with your pdf reader. I don't know about audio itself, but I do a lot of embedded videos in pdf when I make presentations using latex beamer and I can tell you that evince has very limited functionality in this regard. I think your best chance is with "okular". It is a heavy program and pacman will pull a lot of kde dependencies. If you don't mind that then give it a try. Maybe it will work. Other than that you could try "atril".

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: playing embedded audio in a PDF in arch

firefox gives message:This PDF document contains forms, the filling of form fields is not supported? Does this mean built in PDF viewer does NOT support viewing/playing embedded files?

No.  That message means what it says: firefox does not support form filling.  This is completely unrelated to playing embedded videos.  I'm not sure whether firefox plays embeded videos, but I gather you have tried and would know if it does.

The only absolutely feature-complete pdf reader is the proprietary one from adobe (because there are proprietary features of some pdfs that no other software can use).  Although if embeded video is the primary feature you need, there are a handful of pdf viewers that can suffice including okular mentioned above.

Also if you really want lighter weight, there are tools that could extract (and then you could play) the videos.  But if you want a nicely integrated viewer that presents the videos "in place" in the pdf, then something like okular will likely be your best bet.

Last edited by Trilby (2020-08-12 14:47:39)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

terribadrob

Member

Registered: 2025-09-19

Posts: 2

Re: playing embedded audio in a PDF in arch

For posterity Poppler (pdftotext/pdfdetach) lets one extract the mp3 file embedded in a pdf easily

Install poppler (sudo pacman -S poppler) and use pdfdetach -list to find embedded files and pdfdetach -save to extract them

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 2,604

Website

Re: playing embedded audio in a PDF in arch

Mod note: Closing this old thread.

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