Report:PatBase Express/Viewing Results/Viewing Patent Drawings

Viewing Patent Drawings

A representative image from the master patent in the family record is usually loaded with the other bibliographic and family information when viewing an individual result. This image is usually the front page image for the patent document. A small watermark in the upper right hand of the image gives the document number on which the image originally appeared. The representative image is also used in the search result list; please see the The Hit List section for more information.

Viewing the most representative image of a patent family.

Clicking on a representative image will load a mosaic of images scanned from one of the family members (typically, but not necessarily, the master patent), of the very same format and type as those available from the free online patent search service Espacenet. An image mosaic is a collection of patent drawings that have been reduced in size until about six of them fit on a single page. Viewing document images via a mosaic is a fast way to skim dozens of drawings quickly, to get a general idea of the invention without having to click through drawings page-by-page. If a user sees something interesting in a mosaic, they can use the zoom feature in the Adobe viewer to take a closer look, or they can return to the main window and open up the document facsimile image (also via Espacenet or the PatBase PatentOrder service) for closer review.

A drawing mosaic.

Users may can view drawing images by clicking on the individual patent number (in either the family table of the bibliographic record view or in the document list under the "Claims and Descriptions" section), opening up a PDF viewer in a separate window (from the family table) or in the main frame of the screen (from the "Claims and Descriptions" section). Once the PDF viewer is open, the user can navigate through the pages to the drawing. These images are provided from the Espacenet database or from Minesoft's PatentOrder service, and users may save these patent copies individually (depending on the user's subscription to PatentOrder). Bulk downloading requires a separate subscription to Minesoft's PatentOrder service. See the Downloads section for more information.

Image from the patent document.

Editor's Note:

Users may notice that a small "pin" icon is displayed in the upper right corner of the screen when a PDF document is opened in a new window for some selected patent documents. During testing, this pin icon did not always appear whenever a new PDF was opened, and clicking on the pin icon had no discernible effect when another PDF document was opened in the same window (the size and shape of the window wasn't maintained).

This "pin" icon is most likely a feature available through the regular PatBase interface, the new "pinning feature" which enables you to fix the position and size of a window so that if closed, it will open again in the same size and position as before.^[1]

It is unclear why this feature doesn't work correctly in PatBase Express, or why the pinning icon only appears on certain PDF windows. This is a very minor issue, however, that won’t have much effect on the search and viewing process.

Pinning icon.