M
martin griffith
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
Excellent. Downloaded all my old patents.
Ian Bell wrote...
I prefer these guys,
http://free.patentfetcher.com/Patent-Fetcher-Form.php
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.
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
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.
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
Cheers!
Rich
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
Winfield said:
Rich said: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.
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
Yes, but they only cover US patents.
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.
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.
In what way are they better? They limit the number of free downloads and
only cover US patents for free.
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.
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.
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.
Tony said: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.
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.
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 <pat #>".
http://www.tothink.com/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?