The application is also getting support for CBR files

Jul 27, 2017 22:25 GMT  ·  By

GNOME developer Bastien Nocera reports today on some the improvements coming to the Evince document viewer app as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.

The biggest change that'll be implemented in Evince 3.26 is the use of the libarchive library for decompressing various archive types, including the CBZ, CB7, and CBT formats that are usually used for comic books, and it also supports RAR files through the use of the unarr command-line utility.

"We hope to eventually remove the internal copy of unarr, but, as a stop-gap, that allowed us to start supporting CBR comics out of the box, and it's always a good thing when you have one less non-free package to grab from somewhere to access your media," said Bastien Nocera in his latest blog article.

Evince to support PostScript- and PDF-based Adobe Illustrator files

After 12 years, it finally looks like Evince 3.26 is getting support for the Adobe Illustrator (.ai) file format, no matter if the files are PDF or PostScript based, but only if both the backends are supported when compiling the application on your GNU/Linux distribution.

Bastien Nocera says that users will be able to enjoy out-of-the-box support for Adobe Illustrator and CBR files this fall when the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment will be released, but if you're using Fedora 26 Linux, you can already enjoy CBR support if you install the latest Evince version that's available in the repositories.

GNOME 3.26 is hitting the streets on September 13, 2017, and it will also bring improvements to other components of the GNOME Stack, including a redesigned Control Center, a much-improved Builder IDE, and various Wayland improvements for Nautilus, Mutter, and GNOME Shell. Untile then, you can test the latest Evince 3.25.4 development release is now available for download.