PatentMailer

Interested in finding out more about an issued United States Patent--or a pending patent application?
This tool is designed to retrieve the patent (or pending application) from the United States Patent and Trademark Office's web site with minimal human intervention. Further--and most importantly--the resulting PDF file includes the figures, or drawings, that help describe the invention.

Included are both command line and CGI scripts for Un*x variants (most particularly Linux) that will fetch the documents.

The homepage for PatentMailer on the web is
<http://www.valdemar.net/~erik/pmailer/>

Change Log

v2.1 - Major changes to accomodate new direct image access. [Pre-grant pubs temporarily unavailable.]
v2.0.2 - minor documentation clean ups
v2.0 - Support for accessing pre-grant publications. Clean out of code that no longer is supported.
20 Oct 2000 - Preliminary support for retrieving design patents, also mails full text as HTML with corrected links
25 Jul 2000 - Minor bug fixes; also fixed save HTML so links work
20 Jul 2000 - Perl Version Becomes Primary

Perl Web Version

Files: patentmailer.tar.gz

Required Software: Perl 5, Ghostscript (versions 5.5 and higher preferred for smaller output file sizes), libtiff

Required CPAN modules: CGI, MIME::Lite, LWP::UserAgent, and HTTP::Request. Easy install: at command line type 'perl -MCPAN -e shell' and at the "cpan>" prompt type "install CGI" or "install MIME::Lite", etc.

Installation:

Edit the install directory in the makefile (e.g. where are your CGI's stored)
Edit the perl scripts to set your settings and file locations.
make install

Underlying Tools and Scripts

Pat2Pdf

This is the "soul" of the earlier bash version of this endeavor, this command line bash shell script by Oren Tirosh can be found at <http://www.tothink.com/pat2pdf/>.