On 1 Jan 2009, at 6:30 PM, Richard Stahlhut wrote: > Skim is a definite improvement over Adobe and Preview for reading and > annotating PDFs, so I've been attempting to find a way to interact as > rapidly and easily with a PDF on screen as I do on paper. > Unfortunately, printing the PDF is still much easier/faster when I > really need to absorb and interact with the material. > > But I do see the possibilities. > > I have been experimenting with a small graphics tablet at work and a > big monitor (24", which shows two full PDF pages at a time) > > I have only briefly attempted Ink, without much success so far because > I don't seem to write in a way it understands. This may be because my > small Wacom "Bamboo" tablet is getting mapped to the big, wide > monitor, and so my normal writing doesn't map in a way that can be > interpreted by Ink. > > As for using Skim with the tablet, there are two problems I have: > > 1. my most legible writing on a tablet is printing. But printing > does not work in Skim because each stroke is a separate object, which > then gets moved around when you try to make the next stroke. > > Cursive writing is almost tolerable. It looks terrible, but *is* > barely readable. Unfortunately, words requiring multiple strokes > incur the same problem as printing. [note: it looks terrible > because 1) you don't get the same feedback as writing on paper, and 2) > the pixels in Skim are either ON or OFF with no smoothing or shading > as seen in a paint program.] > > The fix, if it is possible, could be to have a hot key (while held > down?) that enables multiple strokes as one object. I can imagine it > would be easy to use, and difficult to accidentally use. In that > case, I would always print, and give up cursive writing. > > Or perhaps a way to disable the ability to grab and move objects so > you can keep writing. [the second one won't make sense if you haven't > tried writing a note]. >
You can join separate freehand notes using Shift-click. Also, you can add separate freehand strokes as long as you don't start too close to a previous one. Also, smoothing and shading is not supported by Adobe's PDF specs, so Skim also doesn't support it. And having modes where you could keep on writing would require a complicated set of interactions to know when to start and end stroking, in effect adding more tool modes. This would be feature bloat and not a reasonable option. (Skim is not a painting program). This is in addition to the problems you already noted (and were an important reason to be hesitant to add the feature of freehand notes in the first place). [Snip] Christiaan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Skim-app-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users
