MAC PDF Reader - Looking for Recommendations

Software
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Somewhat off topic, but I enjoyed the cookie notice when going to the PDFPen Pro website to follow-up on some of this conversation.

Notice
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That is a lot of options to ACCEPT their cookie policy. :slightly_smiling_face:

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46

Hi - I spend a lot of time reading/annotating PDFs.

I agree that PDF Expert is great - it would be even better with OCR. PDF Pen Pro is indeed so-so - I rarely use it.

Four other softwares that are worth mentioning are:

  1. Highlights: really nice PDF reader that lets you save all of your annotations in a markdown side-car file (separate file). Another great feature, if you are reading scientific articles, is that underlining references automatically create hyperlinks to that paper online so you can easily download the pdf). You can also easily add figures and tables to your annotation (in that case the side-car file is saved as a textbundle package instead of markdown). This app is wonderful if you want to import your annotations to one of the many PKM softwares that are markdown-based, like Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq or Athens Research. Highlights has been my main go-to app for >1 year now. The iOS app is quite good too.

  2. PDF Studio Pro: I use it mainly to perform high-quality OCR and modify the page sizes (I like to have a wider margin to annotate PDF files on PDF Expert on iOS).

  3. LiquidText: Great app with lots of nifty tricks, now with both Mac OS and iOS versions: I wish I had more case use for it. Files created are not really portable to other PDF readers.

  4. Skim: I agree with platyhsu that this is a great software, and it’s free. Although things may have changed, the major problem is that the annotation system used is not back-compatible with other PDF readers out-of-the-box. It therefore limits its usability unless you play to only use Skim for the forseeable future.

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