Skim Reviews

Just so good. Fixes all my major gripes with inbuilt Preview.

A wonderful example of what the open-source community can do and one of my favorite Mac apps

Reliable pdf reader and editor.

This application is an excellent tool for students, and any other professionals and non-professionals who needs to annotate their pdfs. It provides full sets of tools for storing your ideas while reading them. This is the best alternative to the default pdf viewer. Highly recommended!

Skim-app is an excellent free PDF reading and note taking software, for the macOS. Though the skim-app is free, it is still better than anything else I have tested, on macOS, Windows, and iOS. Skim-app ought to be mandatory in any curriculum, and a part of the software library of any public school or university. Skim-app assists in comprehensive and deep reading. I have experienced serious troubles with this app, caused by the lackluster implementation from Apple, of the underlying PDF-things which this app relies on. You will probably encounter such impingements from Apple in the future also – beware of the urge for updating your computer system. I miss the possibility of sorting bookmarks, and of the possibility of starting up the app without opening any files, using a key at startup – the function though, is implemented using settings. The team gives excellent support. Skim-app shines in its simplicity, intuitive user interface and its layout of the screen. Highly recommended. /Former ICT school consultant

Good!

This is literally the best pdf reader/annotator on macOS. Preview is simple in functionality, which is also good, but if you want just a little bit more functions, Skim is the one to go!

Perfect for reading and annotating scientific PDF articles!

For anyone wanting a vertically split PDF view, it is quite easy if you are willing to download and compile the source files. Open the MainWindow.xib in Xcode and select the "Pdf Split View". On the right-hand side, select "Show the attributes inspector" and under "Split View" change the value for "Arrange" from "Top to bottom" to "Left to right". Compile and the resulting app will show two PDFs side-by-side when you select "View | Show split PDF".

The best. I just wish the auto-hide TOC feature that was available in versions prior to 1.4.13 is supported in all OSX versions as opposed to just 10.6 (as per ver.1.4.22 via SKHideClosedFullScreenSidePanels) since v.1.4.12 just refuses to work on Sierra and I'm stuck with switching command+shift+T instead of simply hovering to the left side to show the TOC panel. MacOS Sierra slow scrolling bug is already ironed out in the upcoming version. For those who can't wait, choosing single page view mode then single page continuous after opening the pdf file *should* fix the problem (tested and works on v1.4.13 or newer)

This is dynamite. I am a student and it is by far the most useful. It has a few hiccups, but that is to be expected, I really have found this useful, if one of these was really cleaned up and pushed towards students I think it would do really well.

Best OSS PDF viewer for OS X bar none. Period.

Best PDF viewer for Mac OS X to use for latex editing. I use it with TextMate and i can do forward-backward search and auto-refresh with synctex.

it can work on mac

Working on MacOs 10.11 Capitan Ok, so far

Skim is awesome. Yet, it doesn't work on OS X El Capitan at this moment. Shows only black screen for PDF previews, while thumbnails work fine.

Much smoother than Acrobat when page up and down.

I use it in my everyday. Excellent piece of software.

I found that every time I tap with 3 fingers a snapshot will appear but actually I just want to look up a world in dictionary. Can the snapshot function be turned off?

I absolutely love Skim. I love how you can view all your Notes (typed, freehand, lines, arrows, boxes, ALL) separately in their own sidebar and easily locate where they are within the PDF. You can even edit the text that the lines, arrows, or boxes say by double-clicking them. I also love the universal bookmarks – eg. I have a Pharmacy Calculations PDF textbook with a page of unit conversions that I need to reference often, and it is SO convenient not to have to scroll through huge virtual textbook files like that just to reference one page. I am a pharmacy student, and the professors in my school like to use PDFs as their slide format. A select few of them keep their presentations in powerpoint form, which I usually export as PDF just so I can use them in Skim! One improvement I'd like to suggest is to allow word-for-word font formatting when editing ALL texts posts, even from Tools like underline and highlight (non-Note tools) as well as the Text Note tool. I'm talking about when I double-click an underline or highlight or Text Note I made on the PDF and it allows a text box that can then show the text in the Note sidebar. I would like to be able to make individual words in this box bold or underlined or italic, just like you can in an Anchored Note. The last thing that would make Skim perfect to me would be audio recording capability. It would be extraordinary to be able to record my professor's audio within the Skim file, with a playback bar similar to Pear Note, and then click on any of my markings and reference the audio at that time. Also, I do not currently have a tablet, but perhaps in the future, I would want Skim to be mobile somehow. If Skim were to be mobile with audio capability, and yet still keep the Notes and Table of Contents and bookmarking functions it has now, I think it would be superior to many other apps, even Notability. The only thing that would keep Evernote ahead at that point would be its image-text recognition capability, but that's another battle for another day. Audio capability please~!

Better then build in os x viewer, if only there was a night reading theme Needs one more thing that build in viewer is missing! The ability to change the background color of the paper to any RGB color one want's

Skim doesn't have basic measuring tools for drawings, so I'm rating features as poor. It also has a limited help function - it took me a while to figure out that when I opened it, it sits on the task bar but doesn't open a programme window; it waits for me to use Finder to open a file. So I'm also marking it down for not conforming to usual usability modes. However it does look quite pretty and seems to have the basic text markup tools, slightly more than are offered by OSX's Preview application. PS To the user who requested coloured notes... OSX's Preview app offers that.

Easier and more feature-full than OSX builtin viewer.

Skim is very good and helpful. Thanks for the developing team. I would like to suggest one handy function which is in the preview in mac osx: Is it possible that notes color may be with different color and not the same color for all notes ? Thank you for all your efforts.

I have used Skim for 4-5 years; it quickly became my go-to PDF reader and annotation application in undergrad, and I continue using it on a daily basis. The note-taking features are particularly helpful, as are its options to customize the toolbar and highlighting colors. As a grad student with a massive collection of marked-up PDFs, I don't know what I would do without it!