On Apr 30, 2008, at 12:14 PM, Bruce G. Seidner, Ph.D. wrote:

> I just can't get around a pdf the way I would like and
> feel frustrated and impatient with most readers lack of navigation
> options. I like Skim a lot. This is no criticism of Skim, and I would
> like to see it get even better.

I'm lucky enough to be working with monitors that show readable full  
pages, so sentence/paragraph navigation usually isn't an issue.  
Navigation within long PDFs is an issue and though the begin/end and  
page number jumps are very nice, I'm usually scanning for content  
rather than jumping to a page number. PDF displays still lack a book's  
ability to flip through pages and find locations quickly by skimming  
content. Skim's thumbnails are nice (particularly the way you can set  
them to the largest size and shrink them by squeezing the column  
size), but they don't get quite large enough to allow sampling the  
text of pages to look for content.

If I had a relatively large cover flow display to flip through the  
pages of a PDF, I'd probably use it a lot. I rarely use cover flow in  
the finder, or even in iTunes, but this is one application where it  
would shine. The idea would be to briefly toggle the main display area  
to a cover flow view of pages, allow scanning the pages at the minimum  
size necessary for reading, and then toggle back for comfortable  
reading once the desired location is found. I have no idea whether  
this is technically feasible, but I think it's an attractive  
application of the display technology and consistent with Skim's  
name. :-)

Jim Harrison
UVa 

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