Published Application Full-Page Images

The Patent Application Pre-Grant Publication Full-Text Database now contains hyperlinks from the full-text document display to the full-page images of each page of each published application in the database. Our goal is to make new full-page images available each issue day (Thursday).

These full-page images are not directly viewable using most Web browsers.They are in 300 d.p.i. Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). However, there are many variants -- or "flavors" -- of TIFF, including different ways of compressing the image data within the TIFF file. The TIFF flavor used by PTO and other countries' intellectual property offices is international standard ITU T.6 or CCITT Group 4 (G4) compression. Displaying them requires either a TIFF G4 plug-in for your browser, or a properly installed and configured application to which your browser sends G4 TIFF images for display. Note that relatively few image viewers and plug-ins handle G4 compression.

The only free, unlimited time TIFF plug-ins for Windows® x86 PCs of which we are aware are linked from our "Document Formats" Web page.

New! For the Apple Macintosh®, Apple's freely distributed Quicktime version 4.1 works with our images. It is linked from our "Document Formats" Web page.

If you know of other free, unlimited time TIFF Group 4 plug-ins or viewers for any computer platform, please tell us about them.

PTO cannot and will not provide direct user support for TIFF image display or printing beyond the provision of hyperlinks to known free TIFF browser plug-ins from our "Document Formats" Web page.

Full-page images can be accessed from each application's full-text display by clicking on the button at the top of the published application full-text display page. If you have a properly installed G4 TIFF image viewer or plug-in, this will bring up the full-page image of the first page of the published application along with navigation buttons for retrieving the other pages of the document. These buttons include buttons for the identifiable sections of each published application: Front Page, Drawings, Specifications, and Claims.

• Published application images must be retrieved one page at a time.
  
  
• Published application images are only accessible from the full-text display of each published application.
  
  
• The button links are valid only for a fixed period from the time each search is conducted and the hit list generated. This period is currently set at two hours. If this time period expires, the user must execute another search to generate a hit list which will lead to valid image links.
  
  
• Successful printing of published application images is entirely dependent on the user's browser and image viewer software. PTO does not provide support for printing problems. We will suggest, however, based on our experience, that with most image viewers (including AlternaTIFF), images may best be printed using the plug-in's print button rather than the browser's print function.
  
  

Last modified: 15 Nov 2001