Useful program: pat2pdf – fetch patent images from the USPTO database

June 23, 2004 | Link of the Day, Public Domain Resources | By: Mark VandeWettering

Picture this: you run across a reference to a patent that you want to read, but you are too cheap to spend the money that the U.S. Patent Office charges you to download images of the patent in question. What do you do? Apparently you use pat2pdf, a cool bash shell script that downloads TIFF images from the U.S. Patent Office and neatly assembles them into a PDF file. For instance, check out this patent which originally spawned the search for such a gadget. Much thanks to Oren Tirosh for writing this useful little script.