Machine learning is coming for the examiners jobs. :P
You don't need machine learning to say yes to everything.
USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
61–70 of 109 posts
Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Was just about to post this. Unzipping DOCX and parsing XML is much easier than accurately processing PDF submissions.
Why not make yet another XML standard for patents and generate PDFs from it?
Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#63Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To me, the salient question is why is the government officially adopting a proprietary file format? Why is it important to optimize for the trivial convenience of patent applicants? It seems more like rationalization than reason.
Isn't docx technically an open file format? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#65Why require only proprietary format? It's a pity they wouldn't allow ODF.
Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Try extracting tabular data from a PDF! With XML it's trivial, but for PDF you need highly specialized software packages to do this. One of the best, pdfplumber, is largely based [1] on a Master's thesis titled Algorithmic Extraction of Data in Tables in PDF Documents [2]. [1] https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/blob/stable/pdfplumber/... [2] https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/21520/Nurmi...
This was mostly aimed at the various ways the XML document may or may not conform to any number of XSD types. What we 'see' as a table might not be described and stored as a table in the same way in XML. And with XML I mean whatever XML office (the one from microsoft) generates.
A 6000-page spec and attributes that specify if the data is tabular data based on various properties (be it columns and rows or just plain text with start and stop pointers) and then may or may not render it visually as a table is error prone, even on first-party implementations (first-party desktop versions within Windows vary, as wel as on macOS, Android, iOS and their web offering).
If there was one simple data structure describing the table and all other aspects being optional, then yes, a XML based format is easier than OCR. But that's not the case I was pointing at.
Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#67I've been working on some tools that integrate with USPTO (both from the application side and the validation side) for quite a few years now and they've been making a TON of formatting changes recently. A lot of their PDF forms have changed, they're requiring XML versions of all data we submit, they're handling classifications differently, etc. Their process always felt like it was stuck in the past and being handled…
Your work sounds very interesting. I work in the space (IPR's mostly). If you have more information do share some links about your projects!
Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#68Earlier 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.
Neither of these are sane. PDF and DOCX are both built to ape analog paper processes. It's been 40 years of this computer thing, it's time to get rid of the 70s office facsimiles.
Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Microsoft "adopted" XML purely to assuage various regulators that their new format was totally gonna be open, interoperable and standardized. It is a pure fig leaf but judging by all the comments in here mentioning "XML", it seems to have worked.
Re: USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023
#70Why require only proprietary format? It's a pity they wouldn't allow ODF.
Office Open XML (docx), to be fair, is a non-proprietary standard. Microsoft has been forced into that by the EU; and they keep messing with it, but it is actually technically "open".