Today, a friend of mine asked if I would read over her personal statement for grad school and I wanted to give her solid, easy to comprehend feedback. I’ve never had luck using commenting in word processors and have seen annotations in PDFs before but never found a good program to do them myself. Luckily, I read Smashing App’s 21 Free Apps For Mac OS X That Are Absolutely Useful earlier in the day and had downloaded Skim to try out when I started getting reading assignments for class but now had a new use for it.Another friend who had been asked to review the personal statement couldn’t open it because it was a .DOCX so I exported it as a PDF in Pages for him (and me). I opened the new PDF in Skim and it felt a lot like Apple’s Preview, which is the default PDF viewer for Mac, except that it had an extra toolbar for making annotations.

Skim Annotation Menu

The text notes were traditional text boxes of text you could place anywhere. The anchored notes were my favorite because you could attach the note to whatever text you selected to be clear about what you were talking about. I didn’t use the circle, box, underline, or strike out, but if I were a teacher giving rough draft notes they would be really helpful. I used the line and highlight to point to a few different instances where the same text note comment applied which was nice.

After I had spent the time to sufficiently mark up the document, I wanted to save them in a way that my friend could see them without having to also download Skim. I had to experiment with the Save As… and Export options before finding what I wanted. You can Save As… a regular PDF (plain PDF) and as a PDF Bundle (Skim file-type that includes all the notes). These weren’t what I wanted so I went on to the Export menu:

Skim Export Menu

The PDF With Embedded Notes option made a nice new PDF with all of my notes, comments, highlights, and lines (I checked it by opening with Preview). An added benefit to this whole process- the original 118kb .DOCX is now a 78kb PDF with added notes.

This turned out to be a great tool today and I’m excited to use it in the future for schoolwork. I can’t say I always read every PDF a teacher sends out, but this tool would definitely help me take better notes. Teachers could use Skim, too, to add notes where something might be unclear or to add emphasis to a section. Best part about Skim- it’s FREE!