The team responsible for the formation of GNOME releases has approved the main composition of the GNOME new viewer of documents called Papers. Starting from the GNOME 49 release, the Papers program will be delivered instead of Evince under the name Document as a default viewer of documents. Changes related to the replacement of Evince with Papers have been accepted to the GNOME repository. In Ubuntu 25.04, the Papers application is already being delivered in place of Evince.
The Appendix Papers is the outcome of EVINCE, which was created a year ago with the aim of substantial code base modernization. Key differences in Papers include porting to the library GTK4 and development in the programming language Rust. The user interface functioning is ensured through the Rust code, along with significant updates in design, performance enhancement, and digital signature certification integration.
In terms of functionality, Papers is similar to Evince as it allows viewing, searching, and organizing documents in PDF, DJVU, TIFF, CBT, CBZ, and CB7 formats. The LibppsDocument and LibPSVIEW libraries have been cleaned in Papers, with support for the DVI format and the Windows platform discontinued. Various internal Evince widgets have been replaced with standard GTK widgets in Papers. The Papersd background process has been eliminated, and automatic file change detection now triggers a document reload. The separate panel with tools for annotations has been removed, suggesting the use of context menus or hotkeys instead.
