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Contributing

Licensing

Your work is considered a derivative work of the Papers codebase, and therefore must be licensed as GPLv2+.

You do not need to assign us copyright attribution. It is our belief that you should always retain copyright on your own work.

When a contribution it's close to being finished, maintainers might amend the last touches themselves to avoid bikeshedding or endless style nits. You will keep your authorship on any of those changes.

Code Style

Papers uses code formatters to increase consistency and simplify development. Please fix CI code formatting issues, and configure your development environment to use clang-format for C code, and rustfmt for Rust code.

Commit messages

The expected format for git commit messages is as follows:

subsection: short explanation of the commit

Longer explanation explaining exactly what's changed, whether any
external or private interfaces changed, what bugs were fixed (with bug
tracker reference if applicable) and so forth. Be concise but not too
brief.

Closes #1234

  • Always add a brief description of the commit to the first line of the commit and terminate by two newlines (it will work without the second newline, but that is not nice for the interfaces).

  • Whenever possible, the first line should include the subsystem of the papers the commit belongs: shell, libdocument, libview, libmisc, backends, build, doc, flatpak. e.g. “flatpak: bump version of poppler”

  • First line (the brief description) must only be one sentence and should start with a capital letter unless it starts with a lowercase symbol or identifier. Don't use a trailing period either. Aim to not exceed 72 characters.

  • The main description (the body) is normal prose and should use normal punctuation and capital letters where appropriate. Consider the commit message as an email sent to the developers (or yourself, six months down the line) detailing why you changed something. There's no need to specify the how: the changes can be inlined.

  • While adding the main description please make sure that individual lines within the body are no longer than 80 columns, ideally a bit less. This makes it easier to read without scrolling (both in GitLab as well as a terminal with the default terminal size).

  • When committing code on behalf of others use the --author option, e.g. git commit -a --author "Joe Coder <joe@coder.org>" and --signoff.

  • If your commit is addressing an issue, use the GitLab syntax to automatically close the issue when merging the commit with the upstream repository:

Closes #1234
Fixes #1234
Closes: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/1234
  • If you have a merge request with multiple commits and none of them completely fixes an issue, you should add a reference to the issue in the commit message, e.g. Bug: #1234, and use the automatic issue closing syntax in the description of the merge request.

Troubleshooting

To enable the debug messages, set the environment variable for the section you want to debug or set PPS_DEBUG to enable debug messages for all sections.

The following sections are available:

PPS_DEBUG_JOBS
PPS_DEBUG_SHOW_BORDERS

Example

PPS_DEBUG_JOBS=1 papers document.pdf

Asking Development-related questions

If you are working or want to work on Papers, but you bump into development-related questions, the Papers developers and community are reachable in the public Matrix room. Do not hesitate to join and ask questions if you still have any after reading this document!

‘Show borders’ debugging hint

Papers can show a border around the following graphical elements:

  • text characters
  • links
  • form elements
  • annotations
  • images
  • media elements
  • selections

this can be very helpful when debugging display issues related to those elements, to activate it you just need to set two env vars when calling Papers from a terminal, e.g. to show annotation borders:

PPS_DEBUG=borders PPS_DEBUG_SHOW_BORDERS=annots papers

where PPS_DEBUG_SHOW_BORDERS can be set to any of the following values: chars links forms annots images media selections.

If you need to add additional tracing macros to debug a problem, it is probably a good idea to submit a patch to add them. Chances are someone else will need to debug stuff in the future.

Debug Poppler messages

Poppler is the library used by Papers to render PDF documents. When a document presents error, or there are issues in Poppler to handle it, the output can be seen by setting G_MESSAGES_DEBUG to enable debug messages for Poppler.

Example

G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=Poppler papers document.pdf

or

G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all papers document.pdf

Builder Cannot Run Papers

One of the possible problems that can be encountered when running Papers in GNOME Builder is missing SDKs or runtimes that were not installed for some reason. If you encountered similar problem, such as missing org.gnome.Sdk or alike:

org.gnome.Sdk//master

GNOME SDK can be installed from the GNOME Nightly repository, which can be installed with:

# Papers is built against the current unstable version of GNOME's platform and SDK which is available from its own gnome-nightly repo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo

Finally, you can install it with:

flatpak install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Sdk//master

org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//24.08

Rust Extension of Freedesktop SDK, on the other hand, can be installed from the similar repository with:

flatpak install org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//24.08