On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 5:03 PM, Christiaan Hofman <cmhof...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> On May 8, 2015, at 15:12, Rob MacLeod wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have used Skim off and on for some years, just updated to the new
> version, and appreciate a great deal of what the program offers. I drift
> back to Preview at times but then get frustrated again with each new
> version and return to Skim for a while. This relationship is a little like
> serial monogamy and I am trying to figure out why I cannot commit to Skim
> as my lifelong partner (-:
>
> The main reason I leave Skim is the clumsy file management it requires and
> so I thought I would bring this up, perhaps as a topic long since discussed
> and put to bed. So please point me at the answers, if they exist somewhere
> on this list or the help pages.
>
> The clumsy part, of course, is the need to export the file each time I
> wish to save a version I can read with another pdf reader or send to
> another person. I use pdf markup for all my grading, much of the markup of
> papers and grants I collaborate on, and most anything else students or
> colleagues send to me for comment. So I guess I am a power user or at
> least a committed user of pdf markup tools. I have to share the results of
> those edits with others and most others do not use Skim--and I am not
> likely to change this behavior. As a result of need to share, I need to
> save conventional pdf files with the markup embedded and visible. Skim
> makes this harder to do that I would like and I wonder why the Skim
> designers figured their convention was useful. Why take a portable
> document format and make is non-portable?
>
> I try to be very careful about my workflow, saving the file each time
> through the export path, then ignoring the complaints from SKim when I
> close the file. But I have slipped up and I have lost edits and I have
> sent out strangely unmarked files to my students. I really should not have
> to worry about this. Why is the default not to save files with embedded
> markup? Can I change the default somehow to make it save standard pdf
> files?
>
> Thanks in advance for any guidance and counseling I might need to get over
> my hump with Skim and finally make it the tool I use all the time.
>
> Best
>
> Rob
>
>
>
> Rob MacLeod, PhD
> Professor of Bioengineering and Internal Medicine
> University of Utah
> Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute
> Comprehensive Arrhythmia Research and MAnagement (CARMA)
> Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute (CVRT)
> 72 South Central Campus Drive
> Salt Lake City, Utah 84112
> Email: macl...@sci.utah.edu
> URL: www.sci.utah.edu/~macleod
>
>
>
> Yes, this has been discussed to death on this list before. Though I don't
> have the links ready. There is also a discussion of it on the Wiki. (And
> there is also no way this will change, so don't try.)
>
> The original reason for this is that when we started with Skim PDFKit did
> not allow saving notes to the PDF. So partly this is about backward
> compatibility. However this is by no means the only reason. There are many
> reasons to have this. It has the notes as a separate layer, so you also
> still have the original unedited PDF. Also, you can view the notes
> separately. Most of all, PDFKit's saving is too often really bad, it can
> lose you PDF data (partly because PDFKit only supports older versions of
> PDF), or it can save it inefficiently, and it often messes up the notes.
> Also, when it is password protected, PDFKit can not simply save it, unlike
> Skim. Moreover, saving and reason in Skim is because of this a lot faster.
> And then there is backward compatibility with files saved by Skim.
>
> Christiaan
>
Obviously, a number of good reasons. I just wanted to add that PDFKit
really does save incredibly inefficiently. I have a number of scans from
old books downloaded from archive.org. The PDFs are usually around 30
Mbytes. Saving them with embedded notes or in Preview will bloat it up to
beyond 300 Mbytes, saving notes the Skim way leaves the size virtually
unchanged. On a smaller scale, a similar effect can be seen with any
scanned PDF. Also, PDFKit has trouble handling a lot of non-English
characters. Up until Mac OS X 10.11, saving a PDF with certain fonts
containing Umlauts or accented characters would always corrupt the entire
PDF. Now with Yosemite, it only happens once every while, but it still
incredibly frustrating. Once again, that does happen with the way Skim
saves notes. For me, this was the feature that drew me to Skim in the first
place.
JJ
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