cosmicvi/papers-for-windows

This repository is a native Windows port of GNOME Papers, a document viewer that can open PDF files, comic book archives, DjVu files, and TIFF images, and display them across single or multiple pages. GNOME Papers itself is developed for Linux as part of the GNOME desktop project, and this project adapts that codebase so it compiles and runs directly on Windows instead of needing a compatibility layer. The README describes several specific changes made to port the software over. It adds a platform abstraction layer that swaps out Linux specific window management and screen coordinate code for a Windows equivalent. It also wraps several Unix only file operations so they only run on non Windows systems, while exposing the right Windows equivalents in their place. Some Linux only features are turned off entirely for this port, including integration with the D-Bus Keyring and Secret Service, and Nautilus file manager extensions, since those systems do not exist on Windows. Build scripts were also adjusted so copy commands work under the standard Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell instead of relying on Unix shell commands. To build the project, the README recommends running an automated PowerShell setup script as Administrator, which installs the MSYS2 development environment along with the GCC compiler, the Meson and Ninja build tools, a Rust toolchain, and a list of required libraries such as GTK4, libadwaita, poppler, and libtiff. After that, the project can be compiled manually using Meson from within the MSYS2 UCRT64 environment, and the resulting papers.exe can be launched by setting a few environment variables that point to its settings schemas and backend plugins. The README credits the original GNOME Papers developers, who originally branched the project from GNOME Evince, and lists several original maintainers and documenters by name. The project is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3, with full details in the repository's COPYING file.