News of a patents web site that uses .pdf format, unlike the USPTO web site. I've not tried this yet, but of likely interest:
For those of you who search patents for your patrons, there is a new Patents web site that has free PDF downloading of patents. The US Patent Office has its web-site but there you have to page through TIFFs, whereas the PDF downloading from this web site is much faster and clearer.
The web site is at http://www.freepatentsonline.com
Try it out for yourself on the patent for corean.
After you have retrieved and opened up the full text page of the patent, click on View Patent Images below the article title.
This will bring up a page with a blank window.
Click on the link that says View as PDF above the blank window.
Then Save the PDF file for downloading.
A question came up again about using CD-ROM's on our public computers. It's not obvious that you can, since they don't auto-run when you insert the CD, and you don't have a Windows Explorer on those machines to navigate through files.
You can use the web browser to view the files on the CD, though. In the box where you'd normally type a URL (http://something), instead put in the CD and type file:///F (yes, that's three slashes). This should take your browser to a view of the different drives and disks on the machine.
Of course, many of our CD-ROM's require you to install some ^&*($% specialized bit of software to get the thing to work, and we can't install them on the public terminals. So this tip will only help you some of the time.
- Kevin