just found this
martin
just found this
martin
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...
-- Thanks, - Win
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!!
-- Thanks, - Win
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
-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
For those patents/applications available only on USPTO, I use "TiffCombine" to create a single file, then convert to PDF.
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | | http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 | It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.
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.
-- Thanks, - Win
In what way are they better? They limit the number of free downloads and only cover US patents for free.
Ian
I use
-- Keith
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.
-- Tony Williams.
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.
-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)
Is there a "wget" that ISN'T command-line?
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | | http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 | It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
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.
-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)
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