GNOME Papers has been in development as a modern GTK4-based document viewer. There have been many improvements made to Papers and now ahead of the GNOME 49 release in September, it’s been approved to replace Evince as the official document viewer of the GNOME desktop.
In the GNOME Papers tracking ticket, it was formally decided yesterday that it will become the document viewer app of GNOME 49. Sophie Herold wrote:
“Since the alpha for GNOME 49 isn’t out yet, we are approving Papers for GNOME 49 Core from the release team side. This is based on the MR that fixes the missing a11y parts. Usually we don’t accept apps based on code that hasn’t landed yet, but the code is there, works, and is planned to be merged soon. So we are confident to approve it now.”
Tobias Bernard also added:
“There are a few minor remaining papercuts, but given that the alternative is shipping evince for one more cycle I’d say these are nice to haves rather than blockers. +1 for going ahead with this from my side.”
So for GNOME 49 it looks like Papers is set to become the new document viewer.
GNOME Papers is available in Flatpak form right now for those wishing to already use it in place of Evince or other document viewer alternatives. GNOME 49.0 will be out in September while the alpha release is imminent.
