#1024 Searching within snapshots broken

[Rick]

Searching within snapshots appears to be broken.

To reproduce:

• Open PDF
• Take snapshot
• Find (Apple+F)

Expected: getting a working search input field within the snapshot
Actual: getting a deactivated search input field for the main window only which only searches within the main window.

Versions:

• Skim: 1.4.10 (84)
• OS X: 10.10.2 (14C109)

Another solution for me would be if I could open a second instance of Skim for the same file. The snapshots are a bit limited anyhow.

[Christiaan Hofman]

It's not broken, it is not supported.

[Rick]

Is there an alternative or workaround in that case?

[Christiaan Hofman]

You can just search in the PDF. There is no support for searching within a part of the PDF, but this should not be needed as you can just see it. Otherwise, you are really not using the snapshots in the intended way (which is not wrong, you just should not expect it to be further supported).

[Rick]

My use case is that I have to read several pages of the same pdf file at the same time. And sometimes there are references to other parts in which case I generally open a new snapshot to search it there.

Having a second instance of Skim would be the perfect solution but the app doesn't appear to support that either. I have no need for editing PDFs, they can be fully read-only for me but the current limitations make the program quite the hassle.

To work around issues I'm currently just copying the files a few times to work around Skim limitations which is obviously detrimental to the user experience. Is there any way to support any of this or would I be better off writing wrapper scripts for Skim and/or forking Skim?

[Christiaan Hofman]

This is not really Skim's limitation, it is a limitation of basically any document based app that I know of. So you should realize that what you want is really a bit unusual and not worthy of support (implementing it would be more detrimental to user experience than not implementing it, I am not going to explain that further).

The way to do things like this is using history (Go Back) and Mark page/ Go To Marked Page.

[Rick]

Taking Adobe Reader for example (which could be considered the original pdf reader), this is most certainly possible: http://superuser.com/questions/480061/acrobat-reader-how-to-open-the-same-document-in-separate-windows

Seeing as there have been a few similar bug reports about this in the past I would say that it's probably not as unusual as you might suspect.

Regardless, it seems that I have found a workaround (which should find it's way into a menu item in Skim imho): "open -n file.pdf" opens a new instance of Skim which allows to open the file multiple times. Works like a charm :)

To mimic the Acrobat Reader, "Window -> New Window" would be awesome, with a shortcut like "Apple + N"

[edit]
As for going back in the history and/or marking pages, that all takes time. I'm using multiple monitors to save some time :) A side-effect is that I will have a single file open multiple times.