Re: Word attachment...on linuxtoday

[Bernhard Herzog <bh intevation de>]

Richard Stallman <rms gnu org> writes:

>     Plus, there's one patent, which IIRC does not refer to transparency, is
>     only licensed for "the sole purpose of developing software that produces
>     PDF files that are compliant with the Specification (specifically
>     excluding, however, software that consumes and/or interprets PDF files)".
> 
> Does anyone know what this patent covers?  We need to know what to avoid.

The number of this patent listed on the adobe site is 5,860,074. The
abstract I got through http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html reads (full
URL for the patent below):

   Method and apparatus for displaying an electronic document with text
   over object

                                    Abstract

   A method and apparatus for providing an optimized page-based
   electronic document file and downloading the optimized file. An
   optimized document file is created from a non-optimized electronic
   document. Page contents are contiguously written in the optimized
   file and a page offset table is provided in the optimized file that
   includes page offset information used to locate individual pages and
   objects of the document. Shared objects, such as fonts, are included
   in the file after the page contents. When downloading the optimized
   file from a host, the page offset information is read early and is
   used to download a specific page requested by the user without
   downloading other pages in the document.
   [snipped the rest of the abstract]

As far as I can tell, it covers at least part of a variant of the PDF
format optimized for download which allows the PDF reader to display
user specified parts of a document without having to download the whole
thing. With the normal PDF format this wouldn't be possible because the
all important index table which allows quick access to the objects in
the file is at the end of the file.

It should be noted, I think, but IANAL, that the "over object" part of
the title seems to be important for this patent because AFAICT it's
repeated in all the claims even though it doesn't appear in the
abstract.

   Bernhard


URL for the entire patent:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5,860,074'.WKU.&OS=PN/5,860,074&RS=PN/5,860,074

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