Sonny Software

Hello Folks,

What do you use for annotating journal articles? I find Preview typically increases the file size by 2x - 5x of the articles I read. This is a problem for the size of my synced reference library. Adobe Reader preserves the original file size, but the interface is awful and buggy (crashes while searching, no scrolling in annotations). I tried Skim and other alternatives, but they seem to use the same engine for saving as Preview and increases the file size (even when no annotations are made). See attachment for an example.

I'm getting desperate and have downloaded Papers, which seems to preserve the original file size but stores PDFs in its own database. I would prefer to stay with a stand-alone PDF app that works well with Bookends, so I'm curious about what other people use.

Thanks!

Have you tried Skim?

Hi, thanks for the suggestion. I have used Skim, and unfortunately if I use Skim to embed annotations in the PDF (so that they are compatible with other viewers on an iPad), Skim suffers the same problem that Preview does and creates a larger file (actually it creates a file that is identical in size to the one that Preview creates).

PDFpenPro… Not perfect, but feature-rich (OCR, redaction, editing of the pdf itself, etc.) and it syncs seamlessly with its companion iOS apps if you use iCloud.