[sdiy] Nifty patent display tool

[Don Tillman]

Here's a tool I discovered a couple days ago for viewing and printing
patents: 

  http://www.pat2pdf.org

The USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) has scanned images of all
the US Patents available on line, as well as an online patent search
database for all patents after 1976.  The USPTO site is:

  http://www.uspto.gov

That's great, but all the patent scans are in TIFF format.  TIFF
format is used by graphic artists, and is apparently what patent
offices use to share scanned images internationally, but most browsers
can't handle TIFF formatted images, or require a plugin to display the
images, and the plugin may not print out the images very well.

The European Patent Office web site ( http://ep.espacenet.com )
displays patents in PDF format, but it only works a page a time.

'pat2pdf' solves this nicely.  You browse there, enter a patent number
and it runs a little script that:

   looks up the patent
   downloads the TIFFs for each page 
   converts and compiles them to a single PDF file
   downloads and displays the PDF file

I'm liking this a lot.

   -- Don

-- 
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California
don at till.com
http://www.till.com