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!