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September 21, 2004 on 8:52 am | In Patent Searching |

Patently Obvious: Patent Law Blog with the scoop (and comments) on Canadian attorney Peter Eliopoulos’ instructions on how to install the pat2pdf script on your computer.  I’m downloading it right now, but due to my schedule it may be next week before I have time to figure it out.  I think that much of the automation that Peter wishes for could be done via ActiveWords scripting (www.activewords.com).  Drop me a line if you are interested in the pat2pdf/ActiveWords project…

UPDATE:

IT WORKS!!!

These are my comments to Peter’s instructions based on my experience:

Step 1. Note that there are two different sections here…Graphics and Web (I looked forever in Graphics for Web-lynx until I realized that they were two different sections).

Step 1. I didn’t know if I needed Bin and/or Src, so I downloaded both. If someone knows the answer…please clarify.

Step 2. The pat2pdf script downloads as a .txt file (pat2pdf.txt), but needs to be saved with no extension (just as “pat2pdf”).

Step 4. The “Cygwin Bash Shell” is aka cygwin.bat

Step 5. I can’t seem to get it to recognize the CD command…I may be missing a cygwin component…., however it still works, it just dumps the pdfs to C:\cygwin\home\Stephen M. Nipper\.

Peter lists a bunch of his “Next steps” with this project. My “Next steps” are (1) figure out the CD command issue; (2) generate ActiveWords scripts (www.activewords.com) (Buzz just sent me a “let me know if you need help with scripting” e-mail…so we’ll be set for scripting); and (3) see if I can burn the cygwin directory onto a CD-ROM (or copy across the network) and easily set up other computers in my office.

Stay tuned.

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