The team responsible for GNOME releases has approved the inclusion of a new document viewer, Papers, in the main GNOME roster. Starting with GNOME 49, the Papers program will be provided as the default document viewer under the name Document Viewer, replacing Evince. Changes related to the transition from Evince to Papers have been accepted into the GNOME repository. In Ubuntu 25.04, the Papers application is already shipped instead of Evince.
The Papers application is a fork of Evince, created a year ago by one of the contributors to the evince-next branch to significantly modernize the codebase. Key differences of Papers include porting to the GTK4 library and utilizing the Rust programming language for development — the user interface code is being rewritten in Rust. Other notable changes include a significant redesign, performance improvements, and the integration of tools for digitally signing documents.
In terms of functionality, Papers is similar to Evince and also allows viewing, searching, and annotating documents in PDF, DjVu, TIFF formats, and comic book archives (CBR, CBT, CBZ, CB7). In Papers, the APIs for the libppsdocument and libppsview libraries have been cleaned up, and support for the DVI format and the Windows platform has been discontinued. Many internal widgets from Evince have been replaced with standard GTK widgets. The background process papersd is no longer used. Instead of manual document reloading, this operation is now performed automatically when file changes are detected. The separate annotation tools panel has been removed, and users are recommended to use the context menu or hotkeys instead.
Source: opennet.ru
