GNOME's PDF viewer app is named Evince. After development slowed too much, some GNOME developers forked Evince. The new app is named Papers and has switched to GTK4. Part of the app has been rewritten in Rust. GNOME is expected to switch their recommended default PDF viewer from Evince to Papers for their GNOME 49 release, about 7 months from now. Papers is available to install in Debian Trixie as of yesterday.
Papers generally has the same features as Evince. There are some minor differences that I will probably list in more detail in an email to the debian-gtk-gnome list in a few days. The Debian GNOME team is considering switching early from Evince to Papers for Trixie. A major missing feature is that Papers doesn't support Orca for reading document content. For comparison, I tried getting Orca to read PDFs in Evince. The experience was very bad. I had to enable caret mode with F7; then it requires clicking a button in an infobar. Navigation there is awkward. There is an option to "Don't show this message again." This feature works similarly in Atril which is a fork of an older version of Evince from the MATE people. I noticed that Orca support was exceptional in Firefox for viewing PDFs. Therefore, it is my guess that people who need Orca use their web browser to view PDFs, not Evince or Atril. I am asking this list if my guess is correct? Papers has switched from an opt-in infobar to a toast, a visual message (that is read out by Orca), somewhat similar to how web browsers enable caret navigation. When the Papers developers figure out how to get Orca working, the experience will be slightly better than Evince's because of that change. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
