Tips and Tricks
From SkimWiki
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Hidden Preferences
Skim has a few advanced preferences that are not accessible through the UI. You can set these from the command line in Terminal.app. More information can be found on a separate page on Hidden Preferences.
Default PDF View and Window Settings
Skim allows you to customize the default settings for window layout and PDF display when you open a new PDF file.
To customize the default PDF view settings, you just choose your preferred settings in a PDF. Then you choose "Use Current View Settings as Default" from the PDF menu. Then all new PDF files will be opened with those settings. The view settings that are saved are all the settings from the PDF menu (Single/Facing Pages, Continuous, Book Mode, Page Breaks, Media/Crop Box, and Zoom factor or Automatically Resize). You can reset these values by pressing the Normal button in the General preferences.
If you want to use different view settings in Full Screen mode, you can follow the same procedure, but while you are in Full Screen mode. If you don't see the menu bar, just move your mouse to the top of the screen. By default the settings are not changed when you switch to/from Full Screen mode. To reset to this behavior, press the Full Screen button in the General preferences.
New windows, by default, have the same size as the last window shown. Skim also allows you to open new PDFs either Maximalized, so they tightly fit in the screen, or just Fit around the PDF. The side panes always have the size of the last window shown. But you can choose to hide the contents pane on the left for PDFs that do not have a Table of Contents. These window settings can be changed in the General preferences.
Changing Colors
Skim makes it easy for you to modify the colors of notes and highlights added to your PDF in Skim. To change the color of a note or highlight you can either use the Color Panel (choose Show Colors... from the Tools menu). Choosing a color in the Color Panel changes the color of the selected note or highlight. You can also drag a color from the color well at the top of the panel and drop it on a note.
Another way to change colors makes use of the Favorite Colors toolbar item (choose View > Customize Toolbar... to add this item). Clicking a color in the Favorite Colors control changes the color of the selected note or highlight. Also here you can drag a color from the Favorite Colors control and drop it on any note or highlight. You can change a color in the Favorite Colors by dragging a new color from the Color Panel and drop it on the Favorite Colors toolbar item. Hold down the Option key to add a new color. You can remove a color from the Favorite Colors by dragging it to the Trash.
You can change the default colors used for new notes and highlights in the Note preferences.
You can also change your favorite colors in the toolbar control. Just drag a color from the Color Panel and drop it on a square in the Favorite Colors control.
Moreover, at the bottom of the Color Panel there is one or more rows of squares that can be filled with your favorite colors. It works similar to the Favorite Colors control: you can click a square to set the color of the selected note or highlight, or drag and drop a color. However, the colors at the bottom of the color panel are shared by all Cocoa applications that have a color panel. This way you can use consistent colors in all your applications.
Cropping Pages
Skim makes it easy to crop pages, so it may be easier to read and display. There are various menu actions to crop all pages to an appropriate size. To see some of them you may have to hold down a modifier key.
- Crop (⌘K)
With selection: Crops all pages to the current selection (from the Selection Tool). You could create a selection using Select Content, which selects the contents of the current page, or increases the selection to contain it.
Without selection: Determines the size from the contents of a sample of representative pages. Uses different crop sizes for even and odd pages, to take the different margins into account.
- Auto Crop - Separate (⇧⌘K)
Crops all pages separately to its individual contents. Useful for scanned papers with varying content sizes.
- Auto Crop - Combined (⌃⌘K)
Crops all pages to the same size which is large enough for the contents of any page. Useful for scanned papers with approximately equal sizes and contents location.
- Crop Page (⌥⌘K)
With selection: Crops the page for the current selection to this selection (from the Selection Tool).
Without selection: Crops the current page to the size of its content.
Filtering Notes
Notes displayed in the note table in the right side pane can be filtered and sorted.
To sort the notes according to a property displayed in the table, select the column for this property. Select the column again to get the inverted sorting.
To display only notes for certain types, use the contextual menu for the table headers. Selecting a type from the menu will add or remove the types for display in the table. You can also manage the types to display if you choose Select... from the contextual menu on the header. You can also enter a search text in the search field to filter the notes for inclusion of the search text.
Hidden Shortcuts
Most keyboard shortcuts are listed on the corresponding menu item. Some items may be hidden as alternate menu items, that only appear when you press a certain modifier key. For example some of the crop menu items discussed above. Apart from those, Skim also has a few unlisted shortcuts to make life easier. Some only work in specific tool modes or when a note is selected. (⌘ = command, ⌥ = option, ⇧ = shift, ⌃ = control.)
| space, ⇧space, page down, page up | scroll page down/up |
| home, end | first/last page |
| ⌃⌘→, ⌃⌘← | navigate all documents |
| →, ←, ↓, ↑ | scroll |
| ⌥⌘→, ⌥⌘←, ⌥⌘↓, ⌥⌘↑ | change tool mode |
| →, ←, ↓, ↑, ⇧→, ⇧←, ⇧↓, ⇧↑ | move selected note |
| return | edit selected note |
| ⌥⌃→, ⌥⌃←, ⌥⌃↓, ⌥⌃↑, ⇧⌃→, ⇧⌃←, ⇧⌃↓, ⇧⌃↑ | resize selected note |
| ⌥→, ⌥←, ⌥↓, ⌥↑ | move reading bar |
| ⇧⌥↓, ⇧⌥↑ | resize reading bar |
| ⌥tab, ⌥⇧tab | rotate through notes and links |
| t, n, c, b, h, u, s, l | change note tool mode (only in note tool mode) |
In presentation mode, most menu commands are disabled. Some are enabled, as well as a few extra easy shortcuts:
| →, ←, left mouse, right mouse | next/previous page |
| p | show pages |
| a | toggle auto/actual size |
| escape | exit presentation (also in full screen mode) |
Export Templates
You can customize the way Skim exports notes in RTF or plain text formats ("Notes as Text", "Notes as RTF" and "Notes as RTFD" in the Export panel). You can also add extra export types to various text formats. This is done by supplying a custom template for the export type.
The template consists of a single file that should be placed in the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Skim/Templates. You may need to create these folders if they do not exist. You can also move them inside the Library folder on your computer or in the Network folder if you want to make them available to all users.
The name of the template files is used to describe the export type in the popup in the Export panel when you save. The file extension for the template file will also be used for the exported file. Currently the following rich text formats supported: .rtf, .rtfd, .doc, and .odt. The latter is only supported on Leopard. All other types are treated as plain text. Plain text templates should be saved with UTF-8 string encoding.
If you want to change one of the three default text export types ("Notes as Text", "Notes as RTF" and "Notes as RTFD"), you use the special name notesTemplate with the appropriate extension (.txt, .rtf, or .rtfd). The default templates can be found in the Skim application bundle, inside the folder Skim.app/Contents/SharedSupport. Note that the standard text templates ("Notes as Text" and "Notes as RTF") are also saved with the PDF file, and may be used by third-party applications, such as BibDesk and EagleFiler.
See Templates for the syntax of these template files.
Custom Templates
- Text Notes as RTF An RTF template exporting only text for text and anchored notes
- None-Markup Notes as RTF An RTF template exporting only text, anchored, circle, and box notes
- Notes as Plist A text template exporting XML conforming to Apple's property list DTD
- Notes as XML A text template exporting XML with a custom DTD
- Notes and Pages as RTFD An RTFD template exporting notes and thumbnails of all pages
- Your custom template?
Page Transition Effects in Presentations
Skim allows you to use cool page transition effects in Presentation mode. A large number of built-in effects are already provided out of the box. To turn on the transition, choose "Presentation Page Transition" from the View menu, and select the effect, duration, and extent you prefer. Apart from the built-in effects, Skim allows you to add custom transition effects. They are added as Image Unit plugins. Image Units are general purpose graphics plugins for use in many Cocoa applications. These plugins should be added to the folder Library/Graphics/Image Units, either inside your home folder, or in the startup disk's top level folder. You may have to create these folders if they do not yet exists. So where do you get custom Image Units? Well, you could find them on the net. Or you can write one yourself. Also, we can link to transitions written by users from this page. Below are a few Image Units to get you started.
Custom Transitions
- Hole Transition (source)
- Radar Transition (source)
- Blinds Transition (source)
- Strips Transition (source)
- Meltdown Transition (source)
- Acceleration Transition (source)
- Blur Transition (source)
- Pinch Transition (source)
- Box In Transition (source)
- Box Out Transition (source)
- Split In Transition (source)
- Split Out Transition (source)
- Cover Transition (source)
- Uncover Transition (source)
- All of the above transitions
- Your transition effect here?
Printing to Skim
Everybody knows how easy it is to print anything, just by hitting the Print menu item or Command-P. However, this same command also lets you save whatever would be printed to a PDF file. Just press the PDF button at the bottom left, and you get a list of options, one of which is to save as PDF. However there are more options. And one of the options you could add is to open the PDF directly in Skim.
To add this option, create an alias of Skim in the folder Library/PDF Services. This folder can be placed either in your Home folder, on your computer, or in the Network folder. You may need to create this folder if it does not yet exist. If you like clean UIs, you can rename the alias to something like "Open PDF in Skim". This will then be the title of the menu item you see when hitting the PDF button in the Print panel.
In Leopard it is even easier to add this option to the Print menu. Just choose "Edit Menu...", hit the "+" button, and select Skim. However this does not allow you to change the title of the added menu item.
Reading man pages in Skim
Everyone who uses the command line knows how tedious it can be to read a Unix man page in the terminal, especially for long man pages, such as for bash. However, man pages can also be pretty-printed in PostScript format, and Skim can read PostScript. The following line can be used to show the man page for bash in Skim (of course this works for any shell command).
man -t bash | open -f -a Skim
To make things easy, you can add the following lines to a .profile file if you have bash as the default shell, as is the case for new accounts starting from Panther (create the file if it does not exists).
manp()
{
man -t "${1}" | open -f -a Skim
}
If you use the csh or tcsh shell, add this line to your .cshrc file.
alias manp "man -t \!* | open -f -a Skim"
You can now simply type something like "manp bash" to read the man page for bash in Skim. The name manp used here is completely arbitrary. Below is a slightly more complicated version of the alias definition, that sets the file name to something more appropriate and uses ps2pdf to convert to PDF.
alias manp 'man -t \!* | ps2pdf - /tmp/man_\!$.pdf && open -a Skim /tmp/man_\!$.pdf'
Reading text files from the command line in Skim
You can similarly use the enscript command to turn any text file into PostScript, which you then could read in Skim. Add the following to your .profile file if you use bash.
catskim()
{
cat "${1}" | enscript -p - | open -f -a Skim
}
Or add the following to your .cshrc file if you use the csh or tcsh shell.
alias catskim "cat \!* | enscript -p - | open -f -a Skim"
