Skim: great PDF sharing and collaboration
PDF’s are now the accepted document sharing format in most areas of medicine. Even two years ago, I submitted documents and articles for review in Word format. At that time, I needed to have non-native office installed, which meant I needed more RAM and I ended up paying for it, literally.
In the last few weeks, I have submitted multiple articles to supervisors and my college, and they now request PDF submission. Scientific journals have been expecting PDFs for years. Now I don’t need to worry about having my work reformatted on someone else’s computer, or having some clever potential employer hit the “track changes” button and find out all my secrets.
For me, the “save as PDF” in Office 2008 works wonderfully. But Mac users have had it great for years with the “Print to PDF” option. Now I am trying to persuade my supervisors to accept editable PDFs for reviews, rather than Word, as it makes a lot less work and worry for me.
Skim: all you need for PDF reviewing
Which brings me to Skim, an excellent, free, open source PDF viewer, which supports notes and highlighting. Skim looks great and is an excellent replacement for Preview (not to mention good value). Features include:
- adding and editing notes, which can be saved as text files
- highlighting
- making “snapshots” for easy reference
- full screen reading mode
- apple script support
- slideshow presentations (including support for apple remote)
I use Skim to review articles I am sent from friends to give comments on. I also find I like it for a lot of other web downloads, like newspaper articles, patterns and “how-tos.” I think the note making and highlighting is a great addition to these PDFs. Basically, I like to keep my reference papers separate, but any other documents are viewed with Skim.
Remember to have a look at the Wiki, which contains a number of tips and hints that are valuable.
This is not the end of the story, as there are more things we like to do with PDFs. If you collect and read PDFs of journal articles, I recommend Papers, which I have reviewed here.
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