GNOME Papers (Windows Port)

GNOME Papers is a modern document viewer capable of displaying multiple and single-page document formats like PDF, Comic Book Archives, DjVu, and TIFF.

This repository contains a Windows Native Port of the application, branched from the official upstream GNOME GitLab repository.

• Upstream Source Repository: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/papers
• GitHub Port Repository: https://github.com/harshmishrahm01/papers-for-windows

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1. Abbreviations

• PAL: Platform Abstraction Layer
• API: Application Programming Interface
• DLL: Dynamic Link Library
• MSYS2: Minimal System Utility collection 2 (Windows compiler environment)
• UCRT64: Universal C Runtime 64-bit (MSYS2 toolchain)
• CBR: Comic Book Resources

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2. Port Changes & Improvements

This port adapts the Linux-centric codebase of GNOME Papers to compile and run natively on Windows with the following modifications:

1. Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL): Added a dynamic platform source selection mechanism. Extracted platform-dependent GUI / rendering wrapper functions in libview/pps-platform-win32.c to replace Unix-specific window management and coordinate mapping.
2. Unix API Gating:
   • Gated Unix-specific file descriptor duplicate operations (fcntl/F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC) behind #ifndef G_OS_WIN32 blocks in the previewer, pps-jobs.c, and poppler loader.
   • Conditionally included <io.h> and <unistd.h> to expose POSIX write and close functions on Windows.
3. Cross-Platform Compilation Support:
   • Disabled Unix-only features such as D-Bus Keyring/Secret Service integration (oo7 crate) and Nautilus file manager extensions.
   • Replaced platform-specific cp commands in Meson configuration scripts with a Python-based copy script to ensure compatibility under standard CMD and PowerShell environments.
4. Shell Execution Fallback: Replaced the Unix-only glib::spawn_command_line_async in the Rust shell (shell/src/application.rs) with a standard Rust std::process::Command execution path on Windows.

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3. Setup & Build Instructions

3.1 Automated Setup (Recommended)

We provide an automated PowerShell script to set up MSYS2 and install all dependencies:

1. Open a PowerShell console as Administrator (required for writing to system directories if installing to default locations).
2. Execute the setup script in the project root:

   Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process
   .\build-aux\windows\auto-setup.ps1

3. The script will prompt you for an installation path (Defaulting to C:\nbin\msys64) and automatically install:
   • GCC compiler toolchains (mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc)
   • Build systems (meson, ninja, pkg-config)
   • Rust development toolchain (mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-rust)
   • External library dependencies (gtk4, libadwaita, poppler, libspelling, djvulibre, libarchive, libtiff)
   • UNIX compatibility utilities (diffutils)

3.2 Manual Compilation

Once dependencies are configured, compile the project using MSYS2 UCRT64:

# Set PATH to UCRT64 binaries
export PATH=/ucrt64/bin:$PATH

# Setup and configure the build directory in release mode with stripped symbols
meson setup build --buildtype=release --strip --reconfigure

# Compile all shell targets
meson compile -C build

3.3 Running the Application

Launch papers.exe with runtime variables pointing to GSettings schemas and backend plugins:

# Add compiled dependencies and local libraries to path
export PATH=/ucrt64/bin:build/libdocument:build/libview:$PATH

# Expose compiled settings schemas
export GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR=build/data

# Expose backend document readers path
export PPS_BACKENDS_DIR=build/libdocument/backend

# Launch
build/shell/src/papers.exe

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4. Credits and References

Papers is originally branched from GNOME Evince. We thank the original authors and maintainers for their foundational work:

Original Developers & Maintainers

• Martin Kretzschmar m_kretzschmar@gmx.net
• Jonathan Blandford jrb@gnome.org
• Marco Pesenti Gritti marco@gnome.org
• Nickolay V. Shmyrev nshmyrev@yandex.ru
• Bryan Clark clarkbw@gnome.org
• Carlos Garcia Campos carlosgc@gnome.org
• Wouter Bolsterlee wbolster@gnome.org
• Christian Persch chpe@src.gnome.org
• Germán Poo-Caamaño gpoo@gnome.org
• Qiu Wenbo qiuwenbo@gnome.org
• Pablo Correa Gómez ablocorrea@hotmail.com
• Markus Göllnitz (https://bewares.it/)

Original Documenters

• Nickolay V. Shmyrev nshmyrev@yandex.ru
• Phil Bull philbull@gmail.com
• Tiffany Antpolski tiffany.antopolski@gmail.com

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5. Licensing

Papers is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv3). See the COPYING file for license details.