Skim for Mac

Quick summary

Skim is a free, lightweight PDF viewer for macOS that builds on Preview’s basic functionality with stronger annotation and research-focused tools. It’s particularly useful for reading and marking up scientific articles, though it works well with any PDF document.

What it does best

Skim emphasizes straightforward reading and note-taking:

• Create and edit annotations, including highlights and textual notes.
• Capture snapshots of pages for quick reference.
• Navigate documents using a table of contents or thumbnail view, and track your visual history.
• Draw freehand notes and make simple markups without a steep learning curve.

Integration and workflows

Skim plays nicely with research and typesetting tools commonly used on Macs. It supports connections with LaTeX workflows and related utilities, such as SyncTeX, PDFSync, and BibDesk, making it handy for academic writing and paper review. A detailed Help manual explains all of Skim’s capabilities and configuration tips.

Limitations to be aware of

While more capable than Preview in many respects, Skim is not as feature-rich as Adobe Acrobat X. Some actions can be a bit non-intuitive — for example, changing fonts could be simpler — and its handling of embedded hyperlinks is less extensive than in full-featured commercial editors.

Latest fixes and tweaks

• Improved performance when drawing freehand annotations.
• Restored the option that remembers export/save preferences.
• Worked around a macOS Mountain Lion issue affecting PostScript conversions.
• Corrected problems saving notes from the notes document as RTF.