I’ve been getting a lot more of my reading in the form of PDFs. Today I was reading a lengthy PDF in Preview, highlighting text as I made my way through the material. I prefer doing this for certain classes, because while I enjoy printing as much as the next person, I don’t like spending all of my money on printer cartridges.
The Leopard version of Preview was doing an admirable job until I took a few moments for a lunch break. I saved the PDF and grabbed a sandwich. When I left, the PDF looked like this:
However, when I got back to work, to my chagrin I found that Preview would not allow me to highlight a line of text. Instead, it wanted to highlight huge swaths of text:
I opened the document in Acrobat Pro. Same behavior. Perhaps there was something odd about the way the original document was converted to PDF. Perhaps I did something wrong when saving in Preview. I’m sure there’s some logical explanation. But I don’t like spending my hours tracing down the reasons for faulty highlighting of PDFs.
So I downloaded the much-lauded Skim, a free tool for PDF annotation. Built under the BSD open source license, Skim is light, fast. I’ve highlighted, saved, opened, and highlighted several times, and I can’t replicate the Preview highlighting error in Skim. Now I can finish that reading.
Thank you, Skim developers!
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