#1629 Add "Reload PDF" menu option

[Joseph]

This was asked before but closed without good reason. It is sometimes necessary to manually reload a PDF from disk, e.g., if the file has been changed by version control software and needs to be refreshed.

Currently, the document must be ‘physically’ closed and reopened for Skim to read the file again (unless there is a Sync setup with external programs).

[Christiaan Hofman]

This is called Revert, and is present as a standard action.

[Joseph]

True, good point. However, the “Revert” option is unavailable (greyed out) unless the document has been modified in Skim. When using Skim purely as a viewer, the document cannot be reverted if the file changes.

[Christiaan Hofman]

That is not correct. We also enable Revert when we notice the file on disk changes. However there may be limitations to our observations, as I have explained many times. When we know the loaded file is different from the one on disk, we al,low reverting. Otherwise we have no idea, and in fact revert would not work. We are limited in what we can do given Apple's (lack of) support and documentation.

[Joseph]

It seems like file changes caused by version control¹ are not noticed by Skim. So do you mean to say it is impossible to manually trigger a reload?
Would you recommend anything better than closing and reopening the Skim window?

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1. I am using git. Checking out a different commit changes the PDF on disk, but the Skim window doesn’t update and Revert remains greyed out. ↩

[Christiaan Hofman]

if we cannot note it, there is nothing we can do. Just enabling the menu item does not allow reloading the document from disk. How that works and when that works is not something we can know, because Apple does not allow us to know. And we are not going to lie about that just in case. I already explained that in the past. This is simply not possible. Apple is the one you should petition to make it possible.

[Christiaan Hofman]

The most we can (and do) offer is to allow us to check for file changes in the Sync preferences. This is not perfect, but the best we can do given Apple's limited acces to their operations.

[Joseph]

I think I understand. For what it’s worth, I found a workaround. I was actually incorrect about Skim failing to pick up on file changes induced by git — it does seem to detect them.
(Explanation: my output PDF is copied to two places upon building in my LaTeX workflow; one tracked by git, and another in an untracked build/ directory. It was the untracked PDF that was open with Skim.)