Hi Dónal, Skim has been described as "Preview on steroids". Functionally, it behaves like Preview with a second sidebar for notes, and what you can do is add annotations and notes to a PDF document that you are reading, navigate to them in the second sidebar, separately print out your annotations, etc. As far as working like a general PDF reader, it has been more stable in a number of operations for operations like "Find", at least when I was using full screen mode. I was trying to search through archives for some older posts, but my detailed comments about this application were made off-list to Simon and Eliza, and to the mac-access list. Yvonne Thompsen posted about this application on the old macvisionaries list. Almost everything you're used to doing in Preview works the same way, but there are more options. A lot of the options that Skim introduces eventually show up as Preview options. Skim also supports a number of image editing functions. You can find it at:
http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/ Probably the most comprehensive description of the layout of Skim was in this old post to the mac-access list. A lot of this is old stuff, though. <begin excerpt> Date: June 17, 2009 Subject: Finding text with Skim [was Re: Preview, Skim, Acrobat, or a better solution] Hi , If you're using Skim, I'll focus my comments on that application, although it behaves very much like Preview with an extra sidebar for making notes and some extra features. Let me go over this from scratch and give a brief overview of the layout of both Preview and Skim, since I don't recall ever seeing a detailed description of the way Skim works on any of the lists I've subscribed to. First of all, if you're not making annotations I would hide the notes pane. Command-Shift-N (or going to the View menu options on the menu bar and arrowing down to make the selection) will toggle this pane between show and hide mode. (By default, both the Contents pane and the Notes pane are displayed when you bring up Skim; the Contents pane is like a left sidebar to the main text window and can be toggled between show and hide with Command-Shift-T. In Preview under Tiger, this contents pane used to be termed a "drawer" that could be pulled in or out to hide or show, and the shortcut toggle is Command-Shift-D.) When you are reading an Apple manual in Skim, the contents will be organized in a Table of Contents outline view in the Contents pane. I think the document comes up in that display mode by default in both Preview and Skim if it was constructed with a Table of Contents. The alternative is to display thumbnail icons of each page. In Preview, there is a menu button in the sidebar that allows you to select between Table of Contents view and thumbnail view mode. You can find it with item chooser menu and use VO-Shift-M to select the view. In Skim, there are radio buttons for "View Thumbnails" and "View Table of Contents" on the Contents pane. If I tab from the "View Thumbnails" radio button (assuming the "View Table of Contents" radio button that I would reach with VO-Right Arrow is selected), I hear "search text field", I'll hear "Table 1 Row selected" and a number. This is the Table of Contents outline view that David mentioned. If I interact with the Table I can arrow up or down to the various chapters, expand/collapse them with VO-backslash (or on a non-English keyboard, with VO-H twice to bring up the Commands menu, where I can choose "Toggle Disclosure Triangle"), and then arrow down to the specific subsections. If I stop interacting and tab to the main text area, I'll be positioned at the page where the corresponding section begins. Preview behaves in a similar manner. Both Preview and Skim also support searching in the document, but Skim has a slightly more robust way of doing this. If I run a search by typing a string or phrase into the search text field of the contents pane, then results are displayed in the pane where the Table of Contents appeared. I run these tests with the "VoiceOver Getting Started Guide for Leopard" since I figure most people will have this. So, if I type "NumPad" in to the search field, and then tab to the contents pane table area, I'll get a list of the page and context of matches. I'll be told there are 18 results, and I'll get an ordered list of the page and brief context phrase in which the match appears. If there are multiple matches to the phrase on a single page, each one will be separately listed. Again, if I stop interacting with the table and tab to the text area, I'll be at the page where the corresponding selected match in the table was found. Just as there were two radio buttons for view mode of the pages in an Apple manual (thumbnails and table of contents), there are two radio buttons for the search results: you can either have "Separate search results", which is the default, and gives 1 match for every matched string, or "Group search results by page". When you choose the latter option, you'll see the matches ordered by the most matches per page. So instead of showing the matches starting with the lowest page numbers in the document, if you choose the "Group search results by page" button, you'll start with the page that has the most matches -- for example, 6 matches to "NumPad" on page 64. The next result will have the page with the next most matches to your search term (page 99), and so forth. Again, if you stop interacting with the table and tab to the main text area you will be at the selected page. If you tab and delete entries from the search text field (or use Command-Option-F to go there, and delete), the Contents pane reverts to showing table of contents outline view or thumbnails. In addition to using the search text field, if you are in the text area, you can use Command-F (Find) or Command-G (Find next). This is where Skim behaves more robustly than Preview, because you can do the search and have your focus move to the next found string. If I'm reading in full screen mode (Command-Shift-F to toggle on or off) and use Command-F, the Find window comes up with the ability to choose previous or next. If I find again, and use VO+A, reading really does move to the next instance of a match that is found. You can also navigate to specific pages with the "Go to page" menu option (I think the shortcut is Command-Option-G). In conclusion, you have a variety of ways to find and navigate through documents. HTH Cheers, Esther <end excerpt> I still use Preview extensively, but Skim does have nice features. If you want a run-down of using the notes features I'll dig up my old off-list correspondence. There are several types of notes, but I use the one generated with Command-Option-N for most of my work. Cheers, Esther Donal Fitzpatrick wrote: >Interesting Esther I had not heard of the Skim app before. Looks rather nice. > Do you use it much? > >Donal >On 15 Jan 2010, at 19:18, Esther wrote: > >> Hi Dónal, >> >> Since I'm late to this (and your earlier) thread on presentations, I'll just >> mention that another option for displaying your PDF presentations from >> Beamer or from Keynote (when you save them as PDF files) is to use Skim >> instead of Preview. Check out the "View" options listed under Skim's menu >> bar. You'll actually want to use "Presentation" (Command-Option-P) instead >> of "Full Screen" (Command-Shift-F), and you can set up presentation options >> such as the kind of transition, duration for page display, etc. with >> "Presentation Options…" (Command-Control-T) under this same menu. If you're >> asked for presentations as PDF output files (to avoid font incompatibilities >> between Windows and Mac presentation programs), you can also display such >> files with Skim this way (e.g., if you provided a Keynote file as a PDF >> output in this format, such as by using the "Export…" option under the >> "File" menu of Keynote and choosing "PDF" as your format, you can run the >> output from Skim in presentation mode and just use the arrow keys to advance >> slides). >> >> Cheers, >> >> Esther >> >> Donal Fitzpatrick wrote: >>> Thanks Anne,. I can quite happily live with "buggy". It resembles my own >>> efforts at software development so I won't complain... <smile> >>> Anne Robertson wrote: >>> >>>> Hello Dónal, >>>> >>>> I've managed to translate slides using Keynote. This was a presentation >>>> imported from PowerPoint. I found that VO crashed every time I moved to >>>> the next slide, but it recovered quickly and I just carried on as though >>>> nothing had happened. >>>> >>>> So, it's a bit buggy but it's manageable. >>>> >>>> Cheers, >>>> >>>> Anne >> --
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