Bruce:

One way to do this is to drive a single Skim instance from the
outside.  You can set up skim to watch a file so that when the file is
updated, skim will update the display.  (This is normally discouraged
by the Skim designers because it would overwrite any changes a person
makes to a PDF, but for this case and for the case of watching the
output of LaTeX typesetting it's perfect since the user is not
intended to modify the PDF.  To my knowledge Skim is the only PDF
viewer that can do this.)

Information on how to set this up is in

http://schneider.ncifcrf.gov/ftp/skim

It probably can be done in any scripting language, but that's tcsh.

So the method would be to copy the first file into the view file and
then to launch ONE Skim instance on the view file.  Wait 3 seconds. 
Then overwrite the view file with the second file.  Wait and overwrite
with the first file again.

Unix tcsh code:

********************************************************************************
#!/bin/tcsh -f
#(ie run the tshell on this but don't read the .cshrc or .tcshrc)

echo version = 1.00 of twoview 2015 Jan 05
# 2015 Jan 05, 1.00: origin 

set sourcefile1 = =lattice_20.pdf
set sourcefile2 = =lattice_21.pdf

cp $sourcefile1 viewfile.pdf
skim viewfile.pdf
while (1)
  sleep 3
  cp $sourcefile2 viewfile.pdf
  sleep 3
  cp $sourcefile1 viewfile.pdf
end
********************************************************************************

I tested this on two files and it worked even with full screen
display!

Note: Skim can crash when one does this.  I think it happens if the
overwrite starts before Skim has finished reading the file and has
stabilized.  So you may need to adjust your delay time but for a small
single page file you may be ok.  Let it run for a day to see if it is
ok.

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  Senior Investigator
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Center for Cancer Research
  Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  http://schneider.ncifcrf.gov (current link)
  http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent link)

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