Reading PDFs on the Mac

These days everything is moving digital. Today there is digital signage (for advertisements), magazines post their articles on their Web sites often for free or in online subscriptions, newspapers are going completely Internet based and the list goes on and on. Another industry whose medium is making the transition is the book industry.

The popular O’Reilly publishing company’s now has what’s called the Safari Books Online service, and the Pragmatic Bookshelf has every one of their books in PDF format and also pre-release their books (called Betas just like software).

This would be understandable considering these are two companies whose demographics are technical people; programmers and IT Professionals who would be the first to make the switch. PDFs are also great for students and scholars, I have quite an impressive library that has cost me a small fortune and takes up a lot of space, but now thanks to the Sony Reader and the Kindle you can go from this to this.

And not only do you save on space but also price. PDF versions of books are always priced typically around $10-25 less than their paper counterparts.

More and more people are using PDFs and reading books either on their Kindle/Sony Reader/Computer and you should too. However first to read a PDF book on your computer you need an application, and on the Mac there are three; Apple’s own Preview, Adobe Reader, and the open-source alternative Skim.

Preview

Apple made quite a few changes when they shipped the latest version of Preview with Leopard, now it features annotation capability; including highlighting with different shapes, and the layout and looks are both much better.

Preview is limited in its features, but there are still enough that you could get dazed and confused. Thankfully its menu is fairly intuitive. It’s installed by default on Mac OS X and also supports multiple image formats.

Adobe Reader

Adobe’s Reader is perhaps the most widely used PDF reader on computers (or at least was at one point.) They invented the format so you’d figure that they would be the first to take advantage of any new-cutting-edge features in it. However I’ve found that really isn’t the case here.

The Adobe Reader looks more like a well implemented AIR app than a Cocoa Mac app, however the interface is still nice. It also has a simple front-end GUI, which is great if all you want to do is read the PDF.

However if you want to get more interactive Adobe Reader isn’t for you. The functions are difficult to find, the menu isn’t very clearly laid out.

Adobe Reader allows comments, but only if the PDF author used Adobe’s LifeCycle to enable the feature. In all the PDFs I’ve used I’ve never seen this enabled.

Skim

And finally there’s my personal favorite, Skim. Skim is open-source and is developed by C. Hofman, A. Maxwell, and M. McCracken. You can view and put in bookmarks, view in Full Screen or in a Presentation mode and it also supports the Apple Remote. You can highlight and underline text, put in circles and boxes to focus on something and also annotate and embed notes into the PDF.

Another cool feature is being able to link to locations in other PDFs as well.

Skim also has the best GUI of the three as well. Unlike Adobe Reader, Skim’s menu has every feature available in intuitive places and commands. Some that I use a lot include:

• Command-N for putting in a Note (located in Notes –> New Note)
• Full Screen at Command-Shift-F (or View –> View Full Screen)
• Add Bookmark with Command-D (Bookmarks –> Add Bookmarks)
• New Circle with Option-Command-C (Notes –> New Circle)

You can also navigate through the PDF using Command-Left/Right for moving between pages and choosing your Page with Option-Command-G.

Skim by default not only has a full menu, but they also put a lot of their features out in the open with buttons in it’s toolbar. I like things simple and for there to be more room for the PDF so I toggle off the Toolbar (Command-B) and also hide the Notes Pane (Shift-Command-N).

Then I display the PDF as I would read a book (showing both pages) by going in the menu to PDF –> PDF Display –> Facing Pages. I also show only the current pages by unchecking PDF –> PDF Display –> Continuous and checking PDF –> PDF Display –> Book Mode. Also make sure you set this setting to default by checking PDF –> Use Current View Settings as Default.

With this setup I refuse to read a PDF in any other application, it’s that good.

Skim was built for reading PDF books it’s by far the best PDF reader on the Mac.

Preview is the next-best alternative but its demographic is too spread out and is built for viewing images more than reading PDFs.

Adobe Reader comes in last out of the three, its confusing menu and implementation of features makes unenjoyable for PDF reading.