New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available


Martinadu
Posts: 132
Joined: Wed Sep 29, 2004 2:52 pm

New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by Martinadu » Fri Jul 10, 2009 2:43 pm

We are pleased to announce that PatXML version 1.3.4 is now available. This new version contains a number of welcome, user-driven enhancements, including:

* Support for Microsoft® Windows® Vista
* Support for Microsoft® Word 2007
* an improved, more user-friendly interface
* a simplified process for importing from MS Word documents
* PDF preview from within your PatXML document
* better image management, preventing overwriting of drawings
* Support for the Common application format (CAF)

Available for download at www.epoline.org/patxml.htm

10-07-2009


JJdeJong
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon May 11, 2009 7:52 am

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by JJdeJong » Fri Jul 10, 2009 4:04 pm

When is this software going to work on OSes other than Micro$oft Windows? Hopefully this is in the works, but it is taking too long since electronic filing was first available!

I find it outrageous that an international organization like the EPO does not use open standards and urges users to strengthen monopolies.

An why does the installer require me to have Word installed? I can't even install the thing in an emulator. Must I necessarily use Word, i.e. further strengthen monopolies? Can I not feed PatXML with a .doc document created with OpenOffice, for instance?

JJJ


Madu
Posts: 45
Joined: Wed Mar 16, 2005 9:50 am

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by Madu » Mon Jul 13, 2009 10:09 am

Dear JJJ,

I can imagine your frustation, but unfortunately there is not much that can be done about this issue. See question 3, in the Frequesntly asked questions of PatXML.

3. Why was MS Word chosen over any of the other word-processing systems available (e.g. WordPerfect)?

Most people now use Word as their preferred word processor. However, you can if you wish still author your
applications in WordPerfect or any other word processor and import them into PatXML but you will still need
MS Word.


The EPO has always taken this path to develop for the medium that is used by the greater majority and that
becomes more prudent in the present situation of resources that need to be put to the best use.

EPO online services

JJdeJong wrote:When is this software going to work on OSes other than Micro$oft Windows? Hopefully this is in the works, but it is taking too long since electronic filing was first available!

I find it outrageous that an international organization like the EPO does not use open standards and urges users to strengthen monopolies.

An why does the installer require me to have Word installed? I can't even install the thing in an emulator. Must I necessarily use Word, i.e. further strengthen monopolies? Can I not feed PatXML with a .doc document created with OpenOffice, for instance?

JJJ


alexthurgood
Posts: 58
Joined: Tue May 30, 2006 9:29 am

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by alexthurgood » Mon Oct 05, 2009 12:20 pm

Frustration is indeed the Word (TM). And don't get me started on the Gemplus PKCS#11 libraries...

Do you folks at the EPO know anything about SIPO's efforts to use OpenOffice.org to import and export SIPO XML compliant data ?

Take a look here at what was going on in 2004 :
http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2 ... editor.pdf

I appreciate that SIPO XML is not the same as PXML, although things may have moved on since 2004.

Alex Thurgood


yschumbit
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Jan 07, 2010 3:31 pm

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by yschumbit » Thu Jan 07, 2010 5:37 pm

Dear Madu,
Madu wrote:Dear JJJ,

I can imagine your frustation, but unfortunately there is not much that can be done about this issue. See question 3, in the Frequesntly asked questions of PatXML.

3. Why was MS Word chosen over any of the other word-processing systems available (e.g. WordPerfect)?
If you are citing WordPerfect as an alternative to MS Office, this indicates, that your decision is quite old, possibly outdated and it might be the right time to reconsider it. I will give you some ideas to do so
Madu wrote:Most people now use Word as their preferred word processor. However, you can if you wish still author your applications in WordPerfect or any other word processor and import them into PatXML but you will still need
MS Word.
This is really bad. IMO an European institution should not be allowed to encroach on market developments. But with your statement, you are forcing patent applicants and inventors to use MS Word & Co. This is not neutral any more and with your statement you ARE indirectly advertising MS Office and you are indirectly also responsible for increasing the profits of Microsoft. Not that this is bad - but I think it is not the job for the European Patent Office, to increase the profits of an US-American company.

IMO your services should be non-discriminatory and platform-neutral. The only file format, that fulfill these terms ist the "Open Document Format" (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Although Microsoft obtained an ISO standard (29500) by trickery, only very few people are encoding their documents with this "standard", Microsoft removed the format from their latest office-suite due to patent infringement(!) and last but not least: All Micosoft formats are properly written and read ONLY on Microsoft platforms by Microsoft-dependent applications. THIS is definitively NOT non-discriminatory, you are discriminating your Linux- and Mac customers by excluding them from you service.

If you were offering PatXML for ODF, everyone could use it, because ODF (and its main application OpenOffice.org) are as well available on Linux-, Mac- and as on Windows computers. Everyone is able to download, to install and to use OpenOffice.org free of charge.
Madu wrote:The EPO has always taken this path to develop for the medium that is used by the greater majority and that becomes more prudent in the present situation of resources that need to be put to the best use.
It is not so much the frustration about your somehow outdated decision but the (IMO) unacceptable patronage for one player in the market (that is serendipitously the monopolist).

My employer, and this is the reason, why I am getting somehow annoyed by your old fashioned arguments from the last century, my employer (an innovative technology-sme) wants to get rid of the Microsoft lock-in. We are convinced that their products are buggy, stupid and highly overpriced. We are really trying hard and then we see statements like yours, that are completely needlessly forcing us to stay in this crappy Windows world. We want to get rid of the "Windows taxes" and the insecure Microsoft products (e.g. worms, viruses, superfluous and ineffective virus scanners and firewalls inviting industrial espionage ..), but then national and/or European institutions ignore international and free standards and force companies and citizens to license software that is indeed undermining secure and interoperable IT.

In my opinion European institutions, especially ones, that provide important administrative services like the EPO, should be enforced to support only free and open file formats and interfaces. European companies and citizens should be able to decide freely, which software platforms and packages fit best their needs.

In the last century it was maybe necessary, to commit to one proprietary IT-platform. But nowadays, where Free and Open Source Software is available on equal footing with proprietary software, there is absolutely no reason left, why European institutions should force companies and citizens to waste a lot of money and time for software they do neither want, need nor are not able to use (e.g. MS Office on Linux ..).

I would really appreciate if you could reconsider your decision in the near future, the times have changed!

Kind regards,
Yussuf Schumbitrus
(Bonn, Germany)


alexthurgood
Posts: 58
Joined: Tue May 30, 2006 9:29 am

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by alexthurgood » Wed Apr 28, 2010 11:59 am

Ah, Yussuf,

A motivating speech indeed, but in my experience unlikely to change much in the near future, unless the governments that have adopted ODF as their format for document exchange raise the issue and put pressure on the EPO to do something about it. Ultimately, the underlying format of interest to the EPO is the XML used which can be read by its OLF software. If you have a program that can convert your ODF XML into XML accepted by OLF, then you are "quids in", as we say in the UK.

Of course, one can always lament that the EPO's budget still will not stretch to developing an XSLT filter extension for OpenOffice.org (and supporting it thereafter, which costs ressources too) which would do the job nicely, but hey, I imagine that the people in the EPO IT department responsible for managing the Patxml converter have a hard enough time supporting it with all the quirks and undisclosed functionalities of the underlying APIs and proprietary document format.

Until the national offices understand the importance of platform independence, then I doubt that we will see much change forthcoming at the common user level, or at least insufficient to warrant something else being done at the EPO. I would even go so far to say that seeing as quite a few countries now actually implement the OLF system touted by the EPO, itself locked into the use of proprietary, platform dependent encryption libraries (even though the server backend is Firebird/Interbase and the application server written in Java from what I understand), then it is even more unlikely that a truly open system will come into being anytime soon. Scandalous it may be, but it needs to be put into the perspective of the investments in IT made by many governments (and international organisations) which had little forethought for free and open thinking back when the budgets were authorised for the current system architectures.

In a similar vein, one might also ask :

1) why is Patentin (a Windows only and rather dated program) still being used to prepare and file sequence listings, given all of its known technical limitations and given the developments with the NCBI and Blast programs (not to mention Biopython, BioPerl, etc) ?

2) why are chemical formulae still being filed as TIFF or JPG images, rather than CML, Inchl or Smiles ?

3) why are patent drawings still being filed as PDF, or TIFF, or even worse JPG within MSWord documents, when they could be filed in SVG ?

I imagine that there are other such salient points that could come up for discussion, PatXML is merely one of them.


Alex


doraB
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Sep 13, 2010 4:56 pm

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by doraB » Mon Sep 13, 2010 5:00 pm

yschumbit wrote:Dear Madu,
Madu wrote:Dear JJJ,

I can imagine your frustation, but unfortunately there is not much that can be done about this issue. See question 3, in the Frequesntly asked questions of PatXML.

3. Why was MS Word chosen over any of the other word-processing systems available (e.g. WordPerfect)?
If you are citing WordPerfect as an alternative to MS Office, this indicates, that your decision is quite old, possibly outdated and it might be the right time to reconsider it. I will give you some ideas to do so
Madu wrote:Most people now use Word as their preferred word processor. However, you can if you wish still author your applications in WordPerfect or any other word processor and import them into PatXML but you will still need
MS Word.
This is really bad. IMO an European institution should not be allowed to encroach on market developments. But with your statement, you are forcing patent applicants and inventors to use MS Word & Co. This is not neutral any more and with your statement you ARE indirectly advertising MS Office and you are indirectly also responsible for increasing the profits of Microsoft. Not that this is bad - but I think it is not the job for the European Patent Office, to increase the profits of an US-American company.

IMO your services should be non-discriminatory and platform-neutral. The only file format, that fulfill these terms ist the "Open Document Format" (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Although Microsoft obtained an ISO standard (29500) by trickery, only very few people are encoding their documents with this "standard", Microsoft removed the format from their latest office-suite due to patent infringement(!) and last but not least: All Micosoft formats are properly written and read ONLY on Microsoft platforms by Microsoft-dependent applications. THIS is definitively NOT non-discriminatory, you are discriminating your Linux- and Mac customers by excluding them from you service.

If you were offering PatXML for ODF, everyone could use it, because ODF (and its main application OpenOffice.org) are as well available on Linux-, Mac- and as on Windows computers. Everyone is able to download, to install and to use OpenOffice.org free of charge.
Madu wrote:The EPO has always taken this path to develop for the medium that is used by the greater majority and that becomes more prudent in the present situation of resources that need to be put to the best use.
It is not so much the frustration about your somehow outdated decision but the (IMO) unacceptable patronage for one player in the market (that is serendipitously the monopolist).

My employer, and this is the reason, why I am getting somehow annoyed by your old fashioned arguments from the last century, my employer (an innovative technology-sme) wants to get rid of the Microsoft lock-in. We are convinced that their products are buggy, stupid and highly overpriced. We are really trying hard and then we see statements like yours, that are completely needlessly forcing us to stay in this crappy Windows world. We want to get rid of the "Windows taxes" and the insecure Microsoft products (e.g. worms, viruses, superfluous and ineffective virus scanners and firewalls inviting industrial espionage ..), but then national and/or European institutions ignore international and free standards and force companies and citizens to license software that is indeed undermining secure and interoperable IT.

In my opinion European institutions, especially ones, that provide important administrative services like the EPO, should be enforced to support only free and open file formats and interfaces. European companies and citizens should be able to decide freely, which software platforms and packages fit best their needs.

In the last century it was maybe necessary, to commit to one proprietary IT-platform. But nowadays, where Free and Open Source Software is available on equal footing with proprietary software, there is absolutely no reason left, why European institutions should force companies and citizens to waste a lot of money and time for software they do neither want, need nor are not able to use (e.g. MS Office on Linux ..).

I would really appreciate if you could reconsider your decision in the near future, the times have changed!

Kind regards,
Yussuf Schumbitrus
(Bonn, Germany)
I agree, in terms of offering other OS's than microsoft. Is there a way to get it on GNU platform and be able to run it in OSX?


kloven
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Nov 25, 2010 3:22 pm

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by kloven » Thu Nov 25, 2010 3:25 pm

When will I be able to use PatXML with Word 2010?


janepea
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Dec 06, 2010 11:55 am

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by janepea » Mon Dec 06, 2010 12:01 pm

What about Windows 7? Is this in the pipeline please?


Martinadu
Posts: 132
Joined: Wed Sep 29, 2004 2:52 pm

Re: New PatXML version 1.3.4 now available

Post by Martinadu » Wed Jan 05, 2011 4:37 pm

Version 1.3.5 of patXML is now available. This will support Windows 7, Word 2007 and 2010

Http://www.epoline.org/patxml.html


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