general purpose file preview component

Question

Is anyone aware of a good, general purpose file preview component for linux/Qt/GTK/c/C++ applications?

Specifically, I'm looking for a component that I could embed in my application that would allow a broad range of file types (text files, multimedia, etc.) to be previewed without the need for original applications to be installed. The application will be cross platform.

Anyone have any recommendations? If not a component, is anyone using another general-purpose strategy that works well for them?

Answer 1

You can look at how Nautilus (GNOME) or Konqueror (KDE) generate previews for various file types.

Just remember that, generally speaking, if you don't have an application which opens a file type, you won't be able to preview it.