Acrobat for Legal Professionals

November 20, 2007

PDF Creation and Font Embedding for USPTO Submissions

Law firms that file the United States Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO) need to heed the agency’s specific requirements for PDF generation.

The USPTO PDF specification does not allow PDFs to contain:

• Images (including entire scanned pages) above 300 DPI resolution
• Security of any kind
• Embedded multimedia (e.g. sounds or movies)
• Hyperlinks
• Layers

TIP: The PDF Optimizer in Acrobat 8 Professional can ensure compliance with these restrictions. Images may be downsampled, layers flattened and security, links and multimedia elements removed.  The PDF Optimizer may be accessed using the Batch Processing facility, too!

Many federal agencies have long relied upon PDF because of Acrobat’s ability to faithfully render all aspects of printed pages including layout, tables, images and fonts (typefaces).

The USPTO requires that PDF must be:

• Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3) or higher
  (See note at end of article)
  
• No larger than 8.5” by 11” or A4 page size
• Have all fonts embedded and subset

The last item—fonts—is a critical aspect of displaying documents.

Acrobat offers three font choices that balance file size versus view fidelity:

• Fonts Substitution
  Acrobat renders—on the fly—a “faux font” representation using typeface information included in the PDF.
• Fonts Embedding
  All typefaces necessary to render a font are embedded in the file.
• Fonts Subsetting
  Only the typeface characters necessary to render the file are embedded. Typefaces may have thousands of characters. Only embedding the actual characters used can reduce file size.

While Font Substitution keeps file sizes small, it can be problematic for submissions as non-standard fonts and specialized math symbols may not render faithfully for reviewers.

Font Embedding places a copy of the entire typeface in the PDF document.

Font Subsetting balances file size and faithful display because it renders all the characters in a document accurately while keeping file size to a minimum.

Unfortunately, the “Standard” conversion setting in Acrobat does not embed the most common office fonts. These fonts such as Arial and Times Roman are normally installed as part of the operating system.

A recommended best practice is to create a new PDF Conversion setting and employ it for creating all PDFs when filing with the USPTO.

Read on to learn how . . .

More…

November 03, 2007

Acrobat Properties Bar for Quick Access to Text Color Highlights

I recently received an email about using the Text Highlighter tool in Acrobat:

I enjoy your articles on using Adobe. One item I use very often is the Text Highlighter tool. I mark text in different colors depending on the substance of the text itself. To do so, I mark the text in question and then open the Properties Box and then select the color I need.

This can be very time consuming as I am constantly switching back and forth on the colors. I was wondering, is there is a faster way to select a different color?

Mark E. Schell
Senior Vice President and General Counsel
Unit Corporation

At first I was stumped, but then I remembered the solution!

The Properties Bar in Acrobat which offers quick access to many tool options.

Read on to learn about using the Properties Bar to quickly change text highlight colors.

More…