A GNOME release team has approved the inclusion of a new document viewer, Papers, in the main GNOME lineup. Starting with GNOME 49, the Papers application will replace Evince and will be delivered as the Document Viewer by default. The changes related to replacing Evince with Papers have been accepted into the GNOME repository. In Ubuntu 25.04, the Papers application is already supplied instead of Evince.
The Papers application is a fork of Evince, created a year ago by one of the developers from the evince-next branch with the aim of significantly modernizing the codebase. Key differences in Papers include porting to the GTK4 library and employing the Rust language for development—this means the code that supports the user interface is being rewritten in Rust. Significant enhancements also include a substantial redesign, improved performance, and integration of tools for digitally signing documents.
Functionally, Papers is similar to Evince and allows users to view, search, and annotate documents in PDF, DjVu, TIFF formats, and comic archives (CBR, CBT, CBZ, CB7). In Papers, the API for the libraries libppsdocument and libppsview has been cleaned up, and support for the DVI format and 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 manually reloading a document, this operation is now performed automatically when a file change is detected. A separate toolbar for adding annotations has been removed, and users are now encouraged to use the context menu or keyboard shortcuts.
Forrás: opennet.ru
