Grab a Patent (Image)

Gary Price's Resourceshelf blog mentioned this interesting utility for grabbing all of the pages in a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patent search result at once, rather than having to view them one at a time. Normally, when you look at the filing images, you can only view the file (a TIFF image) one page at a time, and print or download each page separately.

The service is called Pat2PDF and does what it's name implies: it takes your patent number search and generates a single PDF of all of the TIFF images in the patent's file. The service is subscription-based, from $5 per document to daily and longer subscriptions. I didn't drop the $5 to see what the result looked like but PDFs are pretty straightforward at representing TIFFs.

I hadn't used the PTO service in a long time and found that I couldn't even view the patent images without having already installed a TIFF viewer for my browser. [A web browser will only open, normally, basic Web graphics files and Web pages. Anything else - sound files, video files, non-Web graphics, multimedia or "flash" files - requires a special helper program called a 'plug-in', which you must install and sometimes pay for on your own]. The Patent and Trademark Office has tested two free viewers and has links to where you can download AlternaTIFF and interneTIFF.

Pat2PDF is a great service if you regularly need to grab a whole patent in a easy to use format. Don't forget, though, that you can use a free PDF printer utility like PDF995 to print a single patent page to a PDF file, and these single page PDF files can be combined if you own the full version of Adobe Acrobat or another PDF editor, like PDF995's PDF995Suite. Considering the increasing adoption of electronic filing using PDF in the courts, you're likely to have (or need) one of these tools soon anyway!