PDF Reader X - Edit Adobe PDF 4+

Almost perfect

Love this app for annotating articles. It is easy to use, intuitive, and exactly what I need for reading research articles.

Two improvements I would suggest:

1) Make the annotation tool menu bar (right side of the screen wider). It's literally 1/4 of an inch right now, and the tiny size of the menu bar and scroll bar on the right side of the page make it so frustrating to painstakingly make sure I click in the right place. There's room on the screen to make that bar bigger and save frustration.

2) Make the color menu a permanent fixture on the annotation tool bar. You literally have to select a color for almost every option on the annotation tool bar. Save me a click of "opening the color menu" by having it on the bar at all times, then I can easily click in between annotation tools and see the color selected all the time. Why does it need to stay hidden if I'm using different colors with each of the tools? So frustrating to have to open that color menu each time I change tools, and often when I select a color, it won't "take" and I have to open the color menu a second time to reselect the color.

Thank you!

Excellent

I've now used it for two months and it's the best PDF reader I've experience for reading academic articles. It's snappy and reminds me of replacing my web browser with Chrome when it first came out. Can easily add native PDF annotations and search through the existing ones. (And it saves them fast when you close the file. Competitors either do this slowly or, like Skim, use a non-native annotation format that can't be read by other PDF readers.) Draggable tabs. Plays nicely with Zotero. The UI for "find" displays a lot of info intuitively. Everything is just well designed. I haven't yet run into a limitation on the free version, and upgrading to pro is only $20 anyways.

It used to crash from time to time when it came out in late 2017, but this appears to have been fixed as of Feburary 2018! (That's why I'm upgrading my review from 4 stars to 5 stars.) If there are old reviews complaining about crashes, keep that in mind.

I prefer it over these other PDF readers on maxOS that I have tried: FoxIt, Preview, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Skim.

Developer Response ,

Thanks, good to know that, It's our honour.
We will try our very best!

Fast reader, but missing bookmarks and more

PDF Guru displays pages quickly, eliminating the 1/2 second of blurriness per page that I get with Apple's Preview. Unfortuately it's missing some other basic features: It doesn't import bookmarks. It doesn't have a "non-continuous" view for pages, so you can't scroll like you are flipping pages.

It has an interesting view that shows thumbnails of all pages, but you can't click on them to navigate to them. It doesn't have a way to turn off layers (some books have background layers that inhibit printing or make the page text harder to read).

Pages scaled at 100% are significantly smaller than they should be; it depends on your monitor resolution.