Page 1 of 1

PDF format of OPS 3.2 manual

Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2018 8:17 am
by langlotz
Dear all

We're having some problems with the OPS 3.2 manual as available in PDF format on http://www.epo.org/searching-for-patent ... html#tab-3.

Depending on how the document is accessed, it's displayed either perfectly normal or in a strangely encoded way. In the latter case:
  • One cannot use Adobe's search function (which then finds zillions of hits for each keyword entered)
  • It seems impossible to mark any text using the mouse. Instead of marking continuous text, it seems like a few characters were marked with a few dropped in between
  • Copy-pasting the so-marked passage into Windows's Notepad creates an endless listing of multiple copies of the text, but copy-pasting to WinWord works fine
The document opens correctly using:
  • Adobe browser plugin with Firefox
  • Adobe browser plugin with Edge
The above behaviour occurs if the document is opened using:
  • Adobe browser plugin with Internet Explorer
  • Adobe Reader with locally stored copy of the file
  • Adobe Acrobat with locally stored copy of the file
Our IT decided that the problem must be with the file rather that our setup because PDF documents of any other source cause no such problems.

Any ideas...???

Re: PDF format of OPS 3.2 manual

Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2018 1:28 pm
by EPO / OPS Support
Hi,

I am not sure that we can do anything in this case, at least not in a short term. We have this one file that gets regularly updated since the time we first offered OPS to the public (over 10 ago) and is used daily by thousands of OPS users worldwide. I will forward your comments to the department in charge of updating it and maybe eventually they can improve it in some way, but that is the most I can promise at this point

Regards,
OPS support

Re: PDF format of OPS 3.2 manual

Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2018 1:45 pm
by Mike_k43
The PDF OPS manual as provided indeed behaves strangely when searching for terms. Instead of highlighting found terms it draws a large blue box around some character. Instead of jumping to the next instance of the sought term it keeps advancing the said blue box by one character. This is perhaps because this PDF is optimized for fast web browsing (see the document properties). I ended up re-printing the downloaded PDF file in PDFCreator, which formed a new PDF which was not optimized for fast web browsing anymore. That new PDF seemingly behaves normally in Acrobat DC when searching for terms.

Re: PDF format of OPS 3.2 manual

Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2018 3:45 pm
by langlotz
Hi Mike_k43

Perfect! I did as you described and the result is a perfekt PDF document that can be searched and text can be marked for copy-pasting!

I had tried Acrobat Pro's "Save as" feature before, which didn't work. Re-printing the document as PDF did the job.

Thanks a lot,
Frank

Re: PDF format of OPS 3.2 manual

Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 11:23 am
by EPO / OPS Support
Dear Mike

We also took your advise and "cleaned-up" the new version and that one is now available here:

https://www.epo.org/searching-for-paten ... html#tab-3

Thank you again for the tip

OPS support