![]() While the viewing capabilities are by no means stellar, the great thing about this service is the simple way it lets you split, merge and otherwise mess about with your PDF docs. ![]() Like PDFescape, this PDF reader combines a simple viewer and an editor through your browser, rather than a stand-alone app. If you’re a Mac OS X user, looking for a PDF reader with a little bit extra, Skim will most certainly tick that box. As with most current PDF readers, you also get a full bag of tools for adding notes and marking annotations to the original doc. As well as presenting itself well, Skim also handles nicely – PDF docs load at a brisk pace, and it’s a breeze to move around the file. You can also let Skim gray out the lines around your reading focus, which can really boost the readability of your PDF docs. ![]() The experience is made slicker by providing full-screen options that do away with menu and tool bar clutter, instead showing only the PDF doc itself – which feels a little like using an eBook reader. Pushed in the main as a PDF markup tool, for Mac-loving scientists, Skim scores over its rivals by looking after the ‘reader’ part of being a PDF reader. While the free-to-use Preview is the DE facto standard PDF reader on the Mac, Skim – an open-source PDF tool – has recently caught many eyes. The only real drawback is that direct tie-in to Chrome. What you can’t do, of course, is edit preexisting text – but that’s par for the course for PDF readers. You can also flip and rotate the PDF displayed, and slap down notes and annotations to it. PDFescape also lets you to enter form fields in the PDF, as well as insert graphics, new blocks of text or extra graphics. All-too-commonly, websites have much of their useful info stuck inside PDFs, leaving you with a bunch of PDF viewers and browsers crowding out your screen. Many will find this browser-based solution a much simpler way of handling PDFs. Click on a PDF file, and that file is opened up direct in your Chrome browser. It has one of the slicker means of viewing PDF content, because PDFescape comes as a Chrome extension, rather than as a separate app. If you make use of Google’s increasingly popular Chrome web browser, then PDFescape is another tool worth checking out. So if you just want to read your PDFs asap, then Sumatra may be the first place to turn. But you can shuffle them around – with rotations, two-page views and the ability to shoot your PDFs off in an email. The Sumatra cupboard seems a little bare, even for a PDF reader for example, you can’t annotate or mark up your PDFs with Sumatra. That said, the speed does come at the sacrifice of a functionality. Sumatra PDF is also pretty snappy at jumping around the loaded PDF too, with none of the usual stickiness. PDF files, even big ones, are zapped to your screen in the blink of an eye, making the whole PDF experience a good deal faster. That’s not something that appears to be an issue with Sumatra PDF, however, an open-source PDF app that is available for free on Windows. Plenty of PDF files manage to glue up your whole system, gobbling up your computer’s resources. One of the real drags with many PDF readers – and Adobe Reader is certainly guilty here – is the painful slowness of loading documents that are any longer than a page or two. Even better – many of them are free so no excuse to avoid reading on, and checking out the grass on the other side of the fence. And those other PDF readers come with a dose of useful functionality attached – enough to make you wonder why you stuck with Adobe Reader for so long. That’s a pity, because alternatives there are a-plenty. We may get annoyed at its niggles, but we never seem to get round to checking out the alternatives. ![]() Hardly surprising, then, that so many of us stick with Adobe Reader to view our PDF documents. After all, while PDF is an international standard now, it was Adobe that brewed the Portable Document Format in their research labs all those years ago. Adobe Reader and PDFs seem to go together like hand-and-glove. ![]()
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