41–50 of 109 posts
I was wondering why docx format would be chosen instead of PDF but they answer it pretty completely here if anyone else is interested: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/docx
They say that 80% of the submissions used to be converted to PDF from word. I'd be interested to know where the other 20% came from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They say that 80% of the submissions used to be converted to PDF from word. I'd be interested to know where the other 20% came from.
I’m guessing google docs is the next most common, and then probably libre office.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like most of those translate to "We build our automated systems around DOCX so you get all our features if you use it". But it doesn't really say why they chose to build on docx.
It actually seems like a sane choice to me. PDF is good for rendering, but horrible for parsing. DOCX is a ZIP file with XML data. Maybe ODT or whatever would've been a better choice, I don't know what the format is like. But if you disregard the usual knee-jerk "but it's Microsoft!" reaction, it doesn't seem like a bad choice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you have little exposure to the industry. My experience is the vast majority already use Word or something else which supports DOCX. I cannot think of another format which practitioners have easy access to and would use. PDF just needs to go away for this process.
I actually do have a lot of exposure to patents, and I know everyone uses DocX already. I'm just saying that that web page doesn't say why they chose DocX, only why you should use DocX.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Office Open XML file format is extremely complex, and takes up around 6,500 pages (compared to ~1000 for ODF). One thing you notice when reading the DOCX spec is that they designed it with the sole constraint that DOC files could easily be converted to DOCX. For example, you'll frequently see compatibility tags like "autoSpaceLikeWord95", "footnoteLayoutLikeWW8", "useWord2002TableStyleRules", and "lineWrapLikeWor…
Interesting! How do they compare feature-wise? I feel like there must be things each of them support that the other one doesn't, but I don't know how consequential they are.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/differences-betwe...
The list was only a few lines the last time I looked years ago, so maybe they're actually trying to make a complete list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m guessing google docs is the next most common, and then probably libre office.
My experience is a large distrust of cloud environments. I would expect Pages and Libre/Open Office to be more common than Google Docs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was just about to post this. Unzipping DOCX and parsing XML is much easier than accurately processing PDF submissions.
OCR has come a long way, so much that visually interpreting a PDF is about as error-prom as parsing XML output from Microsoft in non-microsoft software.
[1] https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/blob/stable/pdfplumber/...
[2] https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/21520/Nurmi...
I was wondering why docx format would be chosen instead of PDF but they answer it pretty completely here if anyone else is interested: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/docx
They say that 80% of the submissions used to be converted to PDF from word. I'd be interested to know where the other 20% came from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually do have a lot of exposure to patents, and I know everyone uses DocX already. I'm just saying that that web page doesn't say why they chose DocX, only why you should use DocX.
Sure it does. I'll give you it does not say why they chose it over other alternatives which I'm thinking is what you are looking for. Are there really any alternatives? The only real alternative I can think of is OpenDocument Format and I don't consider it alternative. As they say on that page, 80% of their users already deal with DOCX so 80+% of them will have to convert to ODF. I can't imagine ODF having any sort o…
It seems more like rationalization than reason.