alacarte: no user journey for associating filetype with new binary script

I have spent a very long time trying to use any kind of GUI tool to configure a file association in Ubuntu Gnome, with no success.

I finally was forced to find old .desktop files from a previous desktop backup which I'd manually authored before.

The requirement is simple - use a specific script in a known path to open PDFs

However, there doesn't appear to be any usable mechanism for doing this, principally because Nautilus (now?) filters the possible applications to launch a specific file according to the Mime type, yet there is no way to specify the Mime type association for a new application aside from manually editing text files and forcing update of the desktop databases directly. Alacarte should ideally anticipate this.

Given the simplicity of this requirement, and how commonly it's likely to be needed, this is a major oversight for the function of Alacarte.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: alacarte 3.7.90-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.10.0-6.17-generic 3.10.3
Uname: Linux 3.10.0-6-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.11-0ubuntu1
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Jul 31 20:57:53 2013
MarkForUpload: True
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: alacarte
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)