2026-02-06T13:03:38-07:00 https://lbaudin.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/posts/feed.xml 2026-02-06T13:03:38-07:00 2026-02-06T13:03:38-07:00 Lucas Baudin https://lbaudin.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/posts/being-a-mentor-outreachy/ <p>I first learned about Outreachy reading Planet GNOME 10 (or 15?) years ago. At the time, I did not know much about free software and I was puzzled by this initiative, as it mixed politics and software in a way I was not used to.</p> <p>Now I am a mentor for the December 2025 Outreachy cohort for <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://apps.gnome.org/Papers/">Papers</a> (aka GNOME Document Viewer), so I figured I would write a blog post to explain what Outreachy is and perpetuate the tradition! Furthermore, I thought it might be interesting to describe my experience as a mentor so far.</p> <p><img src="https://lbaudin.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/posts/being-a-mentor-outreachy/logos.svg" alt="Papers and Outreachy logo" /></p> <h1 id="what-is-outreachy">What is Outreachy?<a class="zola-anchor" href="#what-is-outreachy" aria-label="Anchor link for: what-is-outreachy" style="visibility: hidden;"></a> </h1> <p>Quoting the Outreachy <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://www.outreachy.org/">website</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>Outreachy provides [paid] internships to anyone from any background who faces underrepresentation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the technical industry where they are living.</p> </blockquote> <p>These internships are paid and carried out in open-source projects. By way of anecdote, it was initially organized by the GNOME community around 2006-2009 to encourage women participation in GNOME and was progressively expanded to other projects <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outreachy">later on</a>. It was formally renamed Outreachy in 2015 and is now managed independently on GNOME, apart from its participation as an open-source project.</p> <p>Compared to the well-funded Summer of Code program by Google, Outreachy has a much more precarious financial situation, especially in <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://www.outreachy.org/blog/2024-08-14/outreachy-needs-your-help/">recent years</a>. With little surprise, the evolution of politics in the US and elsewhere over the last few years does not help.</p> <p>Therefore, most internships are nowadays funded directly by open-source projects (in our case the GNOME Foundation, you can donate and become a <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://donate.gnome.org/">Friend of GNOME</a>), and Outreachy still has to finance (at least) its staff (<a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://www.outreachy.org/sponsor/donate/">donations here</a>).</p> <h1 id="outreachy-as-a-mentor">Outreachy as a Mentor<a class="zola-anchor" href="#outreachy-as-a-mentor" aria-label="Anchor link for: outreachy-as-a-mentor" style="visibility: hidden;"></a> </h1> <p>So, I am glad that the GNOME Foundation was able to fund an Outreachy internship for the December 2025 cohort. As I am one of the Papers maintainers, I decided to volunteer to mentor an intern and came up with a project on document signatures. This was one of the <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/papers/-/issues/60">first issues</a> filled when Papers was forked from Evince, and I don't think I need to elaborate on how useful PDF signing is nowadays. Furthermore, Tobias had already made designs for this feature, so I knew that if we actually had an intern, we would precisely know what needed to be implemented<sup class="footnote-reference"><a href="#1">1</a></sup>.</p> <p>Once the GNOME Internship Committee for Outreachy approved the project, the project was submitted on the Outreachy website, and applicants were invited to start making contributions to projects during the month of October so projects could then select interns (and interns could decide whether they wanted to work for three months in this community). Applicants were already selected by Outreachy (303 applications were approved out of 3461 applications received). We had several questions and contributions from around half a dozen applicants, and that was already an enriching experience for me. For instance, it was interesting to see how newcomers to Papers could be puzzled by our documentation.</p> <p>At this point, a crucial thing was labeling some issues as "Newcomers". It is much harder than what it looks (because sometimes things that seem simple actually aren't), and it is necessary to make sure that issues are not ambiguous, as applicants typically do not dare to ask questions (even, of course, when it is specified that questions are welcomed!). Communication is definitively one of the hardest things.</p> <p>In the end, I had to grade applicants (another hard thing to do), and the Internship Committee selected Malika Asman who accepted to participate as an intern! Malika wrote about her experience so far in several posts in <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://blogs.gnome.org/malika/">her blog</a>.</p> <div class="footnote-definition" id="1"><sup class="footnote-definition-label">1</sup> <p>Outreachy internships do not have to be centered around programming; however, that is what I could offer guidance for.</p> </div> 2026-01-28T00:00:00+00:00 2026-01-28T00:00:00+00:00 Lucas Baudin https://lbaudin.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/posts/drawing-writing-with-papers/ <p>Nearly 10 years ago, I first looked into this for Evince but quickly gave up. One year and a half ago, I tried again, this time in Papers. After several merge requests in <abbr title="The PDF library that Papers uses to render documents.">poppler</abbr> and in Papers, ink and free text annotations support just landed in Papers repository!</p> <p>Therefore, it is now possible to draw on documents and add text, for instance to fill forms. Here is a screenshot with the different tools:</p> <p><img src="https://lbaudin.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/posts/drawing-writing-with-papers/drawing_writing_with_papers_img.png" alt="Papers with the new drawing tools" /></p> <p>This is the result of the joint work of several people who designed, developed, and tested all the little details. It required adding support for ink and free text annotations in the GLib bindings of poppler, then adding support for highlight ink annotations there. Then several things got in the way adding those in Papers; among other things, it became clear that an undo/redo mechanism was necessary and annotations management was entangled with the main view widget. It was also an opportunity to improve document forms, which are now more accessible.</p> <p>This can be tested directly from the <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://nightly.gnome.org/">GNOME Nightly</a> flatpak repository and new <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/papers/-/issues">issues</a> are welcomed.</p> <p>Also, this is a new blog and I never quite introduced myself: I actually started developing with GTK on GTK 2, at a time when GTK 3 was looming. Then I took a long break and delved again into desktop development two years ago. Features that just got merged were, in fact, my first contributions to Papers. They are also the ones that took the most time to be merged! I became one of Papers maintainers last March, joining Pablo (who welcomed me in this community and stopped maintenance since then), Markus, and Qiu.</p> <p>Next time, a post about our participation in Outreachy with <a rel="nofollow noreferrer" href="https://blogs.gnome.org/malika/2026/01/26/mid-point-project-progress-what-ive-learned-so-far/">Malika's internship</a>!</p>