Filed under: Software, Freeware, Open Source
Skim PDF reader
In a comment to our recent PDF review, Gary let us know about about Skim, a new open source project to produce a tool for reading and marking up PDFs. Skim already has a number of interesting tools, allowing you to:
- embed notes (both shorter notes that appear over the PDF, and anchored notes which are marked by a speech bubble icon that leads to a separate window)
- add circles and boxes
- if the text in the PDF is selectable, highlight, strike-through, and underline.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mike said 8:20PM on 4-02-2007
Thanks for the link! You're right, Skim is not a PDF library manager (We already wrote BibDesk). Skim is focused on improving the task of reading papers, with the goal that you'll never want to print a paper out again.
I wrote a post with some more info, including two of my favorite features that aren't covered here - Snapshots and Link Tooltips. Take a look:
http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/2007/04/02/announcing-skim-stop-printing-start-skimming/
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umijin said 9:33PM on 4-02-2007
Wow! Nice app! I've been using PDFPen Pro and before that Preview to mark my students' papers.
This one can do some things that neither of the others can. The underline function is fantastic.
One shortcoming, though, that it shares with Preview. Text boxes that I've inserted in PDF files with PDFPen with carriage returns aren't displayed properly in Skim - just as a line of text with no line breaks. In Adobe Reader and other apps these line breaks display correctly.
In any case - I'll give this app a whirl with my students' papers this term.
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Dylan said 10:37PM on 4-02-2007
This looks great. My only issue is that it doesn't save your place when the document is closed.
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starwxrwx said 11:10PM on 4-02-2007
Well I love BibDesk so I'll give this a try!
One thing in preview that annoys me is how the 'insert' text box text is very hard to get to show (hovering over the little ^ often is unsuccessful) and then also you can't select the text (ie to insert the useful edit into your original document)
Does this help? Is it good for viewing commented PDFs?
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Jay said 11:28PM on 4-02-2007
Slightly off-topic, but what would be great is if someone were to resurrect the Schubertit PDF Browser Plugin. Ever since I replaced my PPC Powerbook with my Intel MacBook Pro, I've missed it so much!
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Sam said 9:25AM on 4-03-2007
I like this as a free alternative, and the underlining feature really is quite helpful. However, the notes won't show in Preview. You can embed them in the PDF with Skim, but the notes won't be editable like they are with PDFpen. If I decided to switch apps in the future, I couldn't edit those notes in the new program.
Still, it's a nice program.
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wjdfskdj said 11:44AM on 4-03-2007
This sucks.
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Ben said 10:51AM on 4-03-2007
I've downloaded PDFPen, PDFClerk, and Skim in the last two days, and Skim is by far the best, not only for the features alone, but also the price. Great upgrade from Preview.
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Alex Kadis said 12:31PM on 4-03-2007
I would love if this project merged with Formulate: http://adlr.info/?Formulate Formulate is another open-source project dealing with PDFs but this one deals with writing text. It's fairly basic, but it works!
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Oori said 6:37PM on 5-12-2007
For what its worth, there's a recent version from May 07 of skim that is much improved
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