Package: gnome-core Version: 1:47+6 X-Debbugs-CC: debian-gtk-gn...@lists.debian.org
I propose that we switch gnome-core to depend on papers instead of evince for Debian Trixie. Background --------------- Papers had its first release in May 2024. Papers was forked from Evince after the Papers developers were frustrated that they were unable to get their merge requests into Evince, particularly a switch from gtk3 to gtk4 and a partial rewrite in Rust. Since then, Evince has yet to switch to gtk4 even in its development branch (despite merge requests being available). Evince has had much less development than Papers: in number of contributors, number of commits, and number of new features. My strongest argument to switch is that Papers is better maintained. Brief Feature Comparison -------- - Papers generally has the same features as Evince. - Papers does not support the DVI, PostScript or XPS formats. You can use imagemagick to convert those documents to PDF. - Papers does not have bookmarks support which is different from table of contents links for PDFs which have those. The Notes feature is similar to bookmarks. - Papers has improved Night Mode and has added digital signature verification. The UI is a bit confusing but you can also use Papers to sign PDFs if you have certificates such as those present in Spain's national ID cards. Status in GNOME ------- I believe it is likely but not certain that GNOME 49 will switch from Evince to Papers. The biggest blocker on GNOME's side is screen reader support. I don't think screen reader support will be working for GNOME 48 but it is being worked on. [1] [2] Status in Ubuntu ----- Ubuntu has announced they will try to switch from Evince to Papers for Ubuntu 25.04. It is currently blocked on a review by the Ubuntu Security Team. [3] Screen Reader ------ My opinion is that Evince's Screen Reader support is bad enough that I don't think it is actually used. Firefox can open and read PDFs very well. I emailed the Debian accessibility list about switching to Papers. Sam Hartman replied confirming that he has been using Firefox for PDFs, that Evince's screen reader support isn't as bad as I feared (but he still had to be told that it existed), and that he wouldn't hugely mind if we switched. [4] How to Switch -------- It's a simple swap in gnome-core. Swapping the Print Preview feature is more work. evince-previewer is hardcoded in several places. I think the least disruptive way to handle this (least disruptive to other desktop environments etc) is to patch libraries to use papers-previewer by default and fall back to evince-previewer. We need to patch - gtk+3.0 (mousepad is a good test app) - gtk4 (Have to use GDK_DEBUG=no-portals then gnome-text-editor or gtk4-demo's Printing demo works) - xdg-desktop-portal-gnome (GTK4 uses portals by default, so use gnome-text-editor) Optional - gtk+2.0 (xournal could be a test app) - xdg-desktop-portal-gtk (This is more about enablement for desktops other than GNOME. So maybe test with Cinnamon and gnome-text-editor) Other gedit bundles its own print preview feature so don't use that for testing these changes References -------- [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Releng/AppOrganization/-/issues/24 [2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Incubator/papers/-/issues/46 [3] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-25-04-mid-cycle-roadmap/55690 [4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-accessibility/2025/02/msg00019.html Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
