Patent Office Images With Safari

Safari does not render the images without scroll bars for me, although the images are correctly copied to the desktop when I drag and drop them.

I use shareware OmniWeb for doing patent searches (and other research) because of the way I can load up the tabs. I can load the index for a current classification and then just load the individual patents into tabs which are all shown as thumbnails in the sidebar. The ones I have not yet looked at are clearly marked. I can also easily reorder the tabs and switch them to text instead of thumbnail displays. Its like creating my own roll of microfilm.

Opera (now free) also renders the images correctly.

Both Firefox and Camino give me worse problems then Safari with the images.

You are very welcome.

My 3rd-great grandmother, it turns out, was one of the top women patent holders of the 1800s and her patents appear in several sub classicications so I had to go through every sub classifications of the category contqaining her patents. I often had 50 - 100 tabs open in OmniWeb at one time.

BTW, I live in Orwigsburg, just outside of Pottsville, home of Yuengling beer.

Steve,

That is very strange. I have no problem pulling up the full text of your patent, but the only browser that displays the images is Safari (I also tried OmniWeb, Opera, Firefox, Mozilla, and iCab). With Safari, the image is in a window with both vertical and horizontal scroll bars. I can drag each image to the desktop and then view the entire image in Preview.

The thing is, I have not had problems with other modern (post 1975) patents in OmniWeb that I have tried. I even pulled up several of the referenced patents in the one you want and they appeared with no problem.

The fact that the images can't be viewed in a number of browsers indicates that it is not just OmniWeb that is having a problem. I do not know what is different in this patent over earlier ones. I will have to play around and see what I can discover.

There are no changes in the requirements for viewing the images on the page about viewing images. Quicktime 4 and up should do it.

If worse comes to worse, you can at least drag the 19 pages onto your desktop from Safari, in which case I am sorry you spent the money on OmniWeb (although if you do a lot of research of any kind, I think you will find the way it handles tabs to be very helpful). But as I said, I will try to see what I can discover. And I would be interested to hear what the OmniWeb folks have to say.

I live south of the mountain in Orwigsburg.

Tom

EDIT: Strange. Even though I can't see the images in OmniWeb, I can Control-Click in the area where they are supposed to appear, choose Save as Source, give it a name & location, and the image is saved perfectly and opens with no problem in Preview. Very strange.

Message was edited by: Tom Graves

Thanx to you posting the letter you received, I just learned a new feature about OmniWeb. I know Command-I would bring up a Get Info box for a page in Firefox, but hadn't realized I could do the same in OmniWeb. I found the DImg file for the first page of your patent, clicked on Display, and there it was. Now some comments.

I don't know what you want to do with the images.

If you want to save them, as I said earlier you could control-click on the apparently blank image and choose "Save as source". You would have to give it a name but you could leave the DImg extension. That would save the image to your computer and you could view it in Preview. With the small image you get from clicking on Display in the Get Image box, you could just drag the image to your desktop or you could control-click on it and choose "Download Image As".

If you just want to read them online and don't want to save them, then you can control-click on the image and choose "Copy to Clipboard". Now open Preview and go to File > Copy from clipboard. You can enlarge the image in Preview to make it legible. You could also go to Print > Preview, but you would have to zoom in more times to enlargen the image enough to read it.

If you are viewing the page after clicking on Display in the Get Info box, it is real easy to go from page to page. In OmniWeb's address window, you will see the url of the image. Look for "Docid=US006950803&PageNum=1". You can change the number after "PageNum" to go to the image for that page number you choose. Thus, you could change the number from 1 to 19 to got between all 19 pages of the patent.

These are workarounds, I know. Even with these workarounds, I still think OmniWeb is better for working on your patent than using Safari, although Safari has one option OmniWeb does not. You can control-click on the image in Safari, choose "Copy Image Address", open a new tab, and paste the address in the address window and press return. You will get a very legible view of the document, but it will still have horizontal and vertical scroll bars.

I am glad to hear OmniWeb is working on the problem, although sorry to hear the fix will be no better than Safari's display.

Let me know how things turn out and if you have any comments or further questions. Have a happy turkey day in Ashland.

One other thing, it is best not to include your email address or other personal information in a post on this or any discussion forum because it can be picked up by spammers.

With these discussion forums, if you want an email address to be available, you can check off "Show" beside your email address in "My Settings" and refer people to your profile.

My purpose is to confirm that the patent is readable on the USPTO website. It is not on Macs, but evidently is on PCs as my attorney is able to open it without a problem.

You are partly right in your conclusions. If you use Safari, the images are visible, you just have to scroll horizontally and vertically to see the entire document. The same will soon be the case with OmniWeb as well.

If you use another browser, the images are visible if you know what to do, but most people will not so, in effect, the images are not visible in other browsers.

I have pasted the images into Preview from Safari but after enlarging they are illegible.

Preview initially shows a shrunken image of the graphic. You have to zoom in by pressing Command-Plus Sign to enlargen the image to the point where it becomes legible. Also, as I mentioned, you could save each page to your computer and open them up in Preview or another graphics program.

In any case, the text version of the patent is viewable in all browsers. You can at least proof read the text portion from the text page.

Again, I do not know what is different about the graphics files for your patent. Although you say you have seen others that also appear blank, every other one I have tried is visible (but I have only spot checked a dozen or so, or looked at a couple dozen others when I was doing a patent search and we were probably looking at different patents).

If at some point I get a brouser solution, I will let you know.

Yes, please do.

Steve - download and install the demo Accel ViewTIFF (TIFFPlugInOSX.sit.bin) plug-in from Acordex.
http://www.acordex.com/browseProd/getViewTIFF.html