Drupal 7 - Theming file field for documents

What seems to be a really simple task for any Drupalist got me really walking the ceiling this evening.
I just want to display my filefields, for the document, as a download limk with an icon denoting the file type and with the filesize mentioned. It seems to me that that should be the default way to show a download, but it is not.
After playing with the custom field formatters for a while, I used an easier approach.


1. Go to view modes and add a viewmode
2. give it a understandablen namen (vm_file_icon_download_size)
3. Check file
4. save
5. go to structure > file types (or older Drupal version you can find that under configuration)
6. click 'manage display' in the document row
7. click on tab 'custom display settings'
8. check the new view mode you just added
it appears as a tab in the top of your page
7. click on this tab and then click on manage file display
8. Choose table of files
Drupal will then show a rather ugly table with all element I want, the icon, the filename, the size.
I can rewrite the css to make it all a bit less ugly


.file.file-document table thead {
       display:none;
 }

.file.file-document table, .file.file-document table tr  {
      border:none;
      background-color: #FFFFFF;  
}
.file.file-document table td  {
      display:inline;
}


The link in the display will then look like

BUG: Description bug
But when you enable a description this still won't show.
This is caused by a bug in the file entity module.
https://drupal.org/node/1784762

Using the patch resolves this issue

https://drupal.org/files/file-entity-load-description.patch