Mac Preview PDF - research

[macman4789]

Hi,

Has anyone used Preview extensively for academic research? I’ve looked at at each features and it seems to do the basics like highlighting and adding notes. Has anyone come up against any limitations or is it generally compatible/works well with academic research papers?

Thanks

 

[headlessmike]

I work in academia (physics) and read a lot of PDFs. Preview works well in most cases, but I have encountered a few issues over the years. One is that it has a pretty sparse set of tools. It can highlight things and add notes and that's it. If that's all you need, then fine, but sometime I've had to use other tools because a journal editor requested certain styles for suggesting changes that I could only get with Adobe Reader. Another problem I had a few years ago was that in certain files the highlights I made would not align with the text which caused issues when collaborating with other people who were trying to make sense of my comments. Not sure if this is still a problem anymore though as it only occurred on certain documents.

My go to software nowadays is PDF Expert. I bought a license for it before the app went to a subscription model and it allows me to do more types of annotations than Preview does. It also allows me to edit PDF files directly, which comes in handy from time to time. It's a very snappy app, just like Preview, and feels very natural on a Mac, unlike Adobe Acrobat that always feels slow and clunky to me regardless of the hardware I use.

 

[Slartibart]

I use the free Skim for that.