Emacs Reader submitted to ELPA, naming fight follows

Divya Ranjan Pattanaik and co-maintainer Tushar have submitted Emacs Reader for GNU ELPA. The package is a general-purpose document viewer for PDF, EPUB, MOBI, FB2 and several office formats. Rendering is done by a C dynamic module linked against MuPDF 1.26 or newer, so large page images stay in C memory instead of competing with Emacs garbage collection. The authors say that design is markedly lighter than built-in DocView or the widely used pdf-tools package.

After roughly a year and a half of work they plan to ship 0.4.0 once review comments are absorbed. A later 0.5.0 series is meant to switch to Emacs canvas images, unlocking text selection, highlighting and annotations on Emacs 32 and newer. Pattanaik also asked whether the package could enter Emacs core beside or instead of DocView, noting both already depend on MuPDF and that Reader currently lacks only DjVu support.

The submission quickly became a naming dispute. Mekeor Melire argued that “Emacs Reader” or plain “Reader” practices category ownership, the same problem users already face with lsp-mode, and that the word collides with long-standing Emacs meanings (the Lisp reader, mail and Info readers). Philip Kaludercic largely agreed and proposed “doc-reader” or “doc-read” as a clearer parallel to doc-view. Pattanaik replied that ELPA already carries many generic names and that a package name should first describe its purpose; he said he would rename only if maintainers insisted. Gabriel Santos backed keeping the established name. Eli Zaretskii asked for an explicit list of supported formats before any rename is settled.

Separately, reviewers flagged macOS Makefile and Homebrew MuPDF detection issues and confirmed a successful Windows build.