Report:TotalPatent/Viewing Results/Viewing Patent Drawings

Viewing Patent Drawings

In TotalPatent, drawings are viewed by selecting the Image option when presented with search results.

The Image view icon.

When the "Image" view is activated, TotalPatent will display the publication number, publication date, and title of the document at the top of the screen, followed by a drop-down navigation menu for jumping to Drawings Sheets. Then a thumbnail of the representative (“Clipped”) Image is displayed, followed by a thumbnail for each Drawing Sheet that is available. (See the Image Coverage section of this article, for more information about drawing availability.) When any of these thumbnails are clicked, a new window opens showing the full-size drawing image.

The Clipped Image and Drawing Sheet thumbnails under the Image view.

Drawings may be viewed alongside document text by using the dual view mode mentioned previously. The screenshot below shows an example:

The electronic text and document image may be viewed side-by-side.

Editor's Note:

As depicted in the screenshot above, this feature seems to be a bit buggy, as both the text and drawings are partially cropped out of the window, and a horizontal scrollbar is only provided for the text view. However, despite the bugs, it should be noted that viewing the electronic patent text and the patent drawing or PDF image is a highly desirable feature in a search tool. The need often arises among searchers to read the drawing description while viewing the drawings in order to better comprehend what is being depicted. This is especially true in the mechanical and electrical arts.

Patent Drawings can also be viewed in PDF view mode, as they originally appeared on the published document. Users can select to view the PDF drawing within the same window or saved and viewed through an outside PDF viewer. See the screenshot below:

Dual view of the electronic text next to the document PDF image, with the option to download and view the PDF separately.

Editor's Note:

One of the most valued features of TotalPatent is the ability to view many drawing thumbnails at once and also to be able to view drawings alongside document text. The availability of clipped images and the dual side-by-side view brings the speed and power of image searching in TotalPatent as close to that of USPTO EAST as any commercial search tool. However, as a web-based tool, the image loading speed is slow when compared with other web-based patent search systems, such as PatBase. TotalPatent occasionally take a few moments to load all of the thumbnails of clipped images available for each record, while the mosaic images for each PatBase result appear almost instantaneously.