With most other Ubuntu distributions and the GNOME Archive Manager, it was possible to right click files and use the “Compress…” option to save a bunch of files into the ISO (iso9660) format. Very useful for virtual machines!
However, this option seems to be missing.
Is there a specific package that’s missing that would allow MATE’s Engrampa Archive Manager to compress files to the ISO format? Thank you in advance!
Copy the ISO creating script from the link below by right clicking the link and choosing “save link as”:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lxd7pi6wn0bwts0/create-iso.sh?dl=0
Once you have downloaded it, right click it, select “properties” and go to the “permissions” tab and make sure that you have check-boxed “allow executing file as program”. Then close the “properties” dialog box.
Then right-click and copy (or cut) the file. Then navigate, in caja, to /home/username/.config/caja/scripts (where “username” will be your actual username on your Ubuntu Mate system). Note, that to display the relevant .config folder, you need to press CTRL/h on your keyboard whilst in your home folder (folders/files prefixed with a “.” are ordinarily invisible).
Once inside the relevant scripts folder. Press CTRL/v to paste your file into that folder. Then, navigate to any file/folder of your choice and right click it. You will see one of the menu options is called “scripts”. Go into that menu option and you will see your new script. Select the script and it will create an ISO version of your file/folder that you right-clicked inside the folder.
That’s it. This script will now be permanently available on your system whenever you right click a file/folder.
I appreciate the responses on how to create a Caja script, but I was hoping to replicate the functionality from GNOME's Archive Manager (file-roller). engrampa being a fork of this.
Edit: The original thought of this being fixed in 1.10.0 is incorrect.
I probed through the source code and found this in NEWS:
1.10.0 ------ * allow to compress iso images and tar archives from the caja menu
And it's listed straight out of the box on regular Ubuntu, so this functionality should be here. I have genisoimage installed. Looking at the fact the installed version is 1.8.1, not 1.10.0, shows that it's a bug, and it's been fixed. Now to just wait on the official update, or find a development repository.
The specific commit related to the news item doesn’t address the ability to compress to an .iso image, it has to do with compressing an existing single .iso file (by right-clicking). Currently you cannot right-click a single .iso file and compress (because the context menu item isn’t there), but you can select multiple .iso and compress those. So is there another commit I missed that does allow the compressing of other file types into .iso?
You're right, it looks like the commit description is a bit misleading here and I'm wrong about it being fixed.
I just tried compiling and installing Engrampa 1.1.10 in a fresh Ubuntu MATE environment and can confirm nothing has changed.
I will consider filling in a bug report. Thank you for pointing this out!
You’re welcome, I barely caught it myself - was originally going to say what you wrote, but what stuck in my mind was how they said “ISO-9660 CD Disc Image (.iso) [Read-only mode]” and on another site the [Read-only mode] was not there. These posts corrected my thinking of lumping in ISOs with other disk image formats that can/are compressed, when in fact the ISO standard in general use is not compressed.
I filled a bug report, so fingers crossed this broken feature gets noticed. It’s been wonderful having all types of archives in one dialog box in Ubuntu, even the ISO. 
The help documentation is definitely outdated. Here’s 3 places alone: file-roller README, engrampa README and even Ubuntu’s Wiki on File-Roller.
I updated the Ubuntu Wiki, and found your report on engrampa’s GitHub. I would do the same for file-roller but I’m really scratching my head how Git works, I’ll figure it out. 
I did compare the source code from both projects and they’re very similar, like the mention of genisoimage in both. Unless… it was forked at a time before this functionality was added, and/or if it was mistakenly thought just “read only”. I’m not too sure what’s happening. It’s been possible in file-roller since at least Ubuntu 14.04, and possibly versions prior to that.
I have noticed there are other formats (.ear, .war) included in other Ubuntu 15.04 distributions are not present in engrampa. Maybe it’s lagging a bit behind right now?