patents to pdf

Excellent. Downloaded all my old patents.

Ian

I prefer these guys,

So far I've accumulated about 1000 patents that interest me, taking 866MB of disk space. I'm sorry to say that I paid $3 apiece for many of them in the bad old days...

I don't get this - the USPTO has had them online for free ever since I can remember the USPTO being on-line. The only glitch is that their images are .TIFF format, so you used to have to download a reader, but nowadays even that probably isn't necessary.

Cheers! Rich

The benefit of a pdf file is it's just one file, instead of one file per page. What a pain!!

Page-by-page images. Yuk. It was worth $3 or $5 each to get them into a more useful form, though why the USPTO chose TIFFs rather than just putting them online in PDF format is hard to figure.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

For those patents/applications available only on USPTO, I use "TiffCombine" to create a single file, then convert to PDF.

...Jim Thompson

Yes, but they only cover US patents.

Ian

Ah. Now I understand.

Never mind. :-)

Cheers! Rich

Well, I don't remember how I did it, but I have a few patents here in a file folder - that's paper, in a Pendaflex - and IIRC they were trivially easy to print.

But, as has been said, the USPTO only has US patents. )-;

Thnaks! Rich

You hit PRINT multiple times as you displayed pages one at a time?

Now imagine saving each to a different file, then manually combining them into one file somehow... Printing is easy by comparison.

In what way are they better? They limit the number of free downloads and only cover US patents for free.

Ian

I use

The Europeans made 'em do it. Really. The PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) specifies the (unusual) storage format, which is .TIFF with CCITT Group 4 compression.

You'd think they could offer '.PDF' conversion, but I suppose their servers are already severely taxed as it is...

Cheers, James Arthur

Easily batchable with wget (to fetch the subsequent TIFFs), tiffcp (to make one multi-page TIFF out of the single images) and finally tiff2pdf to create the pdf wrapper.

robert

I was supplied with a collection of electronic circuit diagrams the other day. The originals in their CAD were in PDF form, but they converted them to multipage TIFFs for supply to outsiders. They explained that the reason was legal, in that it is apparently difficult to modify a TIFF without leaving footprints.

Detemining whether documents have been copied or modified could be important in court cases..... theft of IP, or assigning blame in the event of an accident, or whatever.

PDF's can now be locked for similar reasons.

Sounds sensible enough. Investigated, there usually are rational explanations for these requirements.

Thanks. James Arthur

The pat2pdf script (don't confuse it with the online version, pat2pdf.org) automates that all nicely. It uses either wget or lynx (whichever you like) to get the tiffs, then tiff2ps on each, then gs to assemble a multi-page pdf. Just one command line action - "pat2pdf ".

Obviously, you need to have either wget or lynx, plus tiff2ps, plus gs already, for it to work. It's just a shell script.

Is there a "wget" that ISN'T command-line?

...Jim Thompson

Wellll....... There *is* a sort of GUI (TCL/TK) frontend (TKwget) that sort of makes things a bit easier. Thing is, wget was intended to be run in the background unattended, probably as a cron job, for mirroring sites, and it has a lot of configurable options. You still need the manual in front of you using TKwget. The usefulness of wget is largely in its being able to be piped into other applications, as in pat2pdf.

You can run into real trouble if you give wget the wrong options. Not only will it build a replica if a site on your machine, it will follow all the links to other sites, and build those, too. You come in in a morning to find gigabytes that you didn't want.

Pat2pdf goes to uspto.gov, finds the tiffs, does the conversion, saves the pdf and quits cold, I'm glad to say.