A mention was made last September of free software called GetIPDL, but I
wonder if everyone on the list fully appreciated what this free software
has to offer.
This is software which receives from you a patent number and a country. It
then runs off to the web site of that country's patent office and obtains
images of all of the pages of the patent. It then stitches them together
neatly into a PDF file for you, which you can store on your hard disk
etc. Or you can store a multipage TIFF. Or you can store the text of the
patent complete with hyperlinks.
All for free.
It works for lots of countries.
The software is available free from
http://www.aurora.dti.ne.jp/~ujihara/GetIPDL/English/ .
My impression is that the author is a struggling chemistry grad student who
found the time to write this software and give it away. The author has a
"wish list" of chemistry textbooks that he hopes happy users will purchase
for him from Amazon.
We saved a thousand dollars or so in the past few weeks, using this
software. We then went to the author's "wish list" and purchased one of
the listed books to be a gift for the author. If you use GetIPDL I hope
you will consider doing this too.
Here are a few notes on installing GetIPDL.
0. GetIPDL is distributed as a ZIP file, so you will need an unzipping
utility if you don't already have one.
1. If using NT, you will need to update it to SP 6. This requires logging
in as an administrator and requires a reboot.
2. You will need to install the Microsoft installer (InstMSI) which is
different for 2000 or for NT. This requires logging in as an
administrator. This may also require a reboot.
3. If Internet Explorer is older than 5.5, you will need to update
that. This, too, requires a reboot.
4. If you don't have Adobe Reader, you should install it. If your Adobe
Reader is older than version 5, you will want to update it so that you can
save the PDFs.
5. Once you get all of this done, then click on GetIPDL.msi which is one
of the files you get when you unzip the ZIP file.
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