I did initial Papers packaging and here is the new package review request for it: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2305882

OK, the package is now finally through the review and in F41 updates-testing and in rawhide.
dnf install --enablerepo=updates-testing papers to test.

Thank you Kalev!

@jbicha has proposed replacing Evince with Papers in Debian 13.

I believe Fedora should consider doing the same for Fedora 42 even though GNOME hasn't adopted Papers upstream yet. I've been using Papers exclusively for months and it's been great, and it's far nicer to use than Evince.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/2025/02/msg00016.html

Thanks Tomas for proposing this discussion to the working group meeting.

Worth mentioning that CentOS Stream 10 and, consequently, RHEL10 already made the switch to Papers. See https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/release-engineering/comps/-/blob/c10s/comps-centos-stream-10.xml.in#L417

It would be great if we could align GNOME - Fedora - C10S

I also think that Papers works pretty well now. I'm for replacing Evince with Papers in Fedora too.

Now that we have Papers 48 beta, we can do this.

PR to replace Evince with Papers: https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/pull-request/1094

Just to restate some details from my Debian email that I haven't had time to work on yet. This needs some work done in upstream libraries to use Papers ahead of Evince for GTK's print preview.

• gtk3: I think if Papers isn't installed, this should fallback to Evince to not disrupt other desktops
• xdg-desktop-portal-gnome: Maybe this could just hardcode Papers since GNOME should be the only desktop using this code.
• patching gtk4 directly is a low priority since gtk4 uses portals by default
• don't use gedit to test gtk3 since it bundles its own print preview provider. You can use mousepad

xdg-desktop-portal-gnome: Maybe this could just hardcode Papers since GNOME should be the only desktop using this code.

IIRC, Niri uses this portal implementation, so it's not completely true that it's GNOME only.

gtk3: I think if Papers isn't installed, this should fallback to Evince to not disrupt other desktops

There are two GTK3 forks of Evince currently maintained in Fedora: Xreader (from XApps/Cinnamon) and Atril (from MATE). Wouldn't either of these work fine for GTK3?

I didn't test it, but I don't believe you need to use a GTK3 app for the GTK3 Print Preview feature because it's just a link to a separate app really. So I think that GTK3 ought to use Papers for that feature if installed and then fall back. Actually, this probably means that things weren't working for MATE anyway unless MATE was shipping the evince previewer. If the previewer is not available, GTK just hides the Print Preview button so people may not have been aware that something was missing.

For reference, I believe this is the working command to replace in GTK:

papers-previewer --unlink-tempfile --print-settings %s %f

Hmm, then it should be an easy fix.

Actually I did test it with the gtk-3.0 settings.ini so yes, it works fine to have Papers provide the GTK3 previewer. I just don't think settings.ini is useful for supporting multiple desktops so I think a code fix instead of a .ini fix is needed.

We also need to change the mimeapps.list in the gnome-desktop3 package.

This change is tentatively approved for F43. We will implement in rawhide now. We can create a new issue report if we wish to reconsider before release, which might make sense if Papers does not progress through the upstream incubation process as expected.

I hope that I can finish the content area accessibility work at least for the 49 release, so we don't have an a11y regression because of this change.

Hi, we actually discussed this yesterday and noted that Evince is switching to GTK 4, so we expect accessibility in Evince to break, putting it on par with Papers.