• The exclude dictionary is set per computer user and across all of Microsoft Office.  Thus, you can’t easily have a separate exclude dictionary for Client A and Client B, In-House Attorney A and In-House Attorney B, Partner A and Partner B, Inventor A and Inventor B, email versus “normal” documents, patent application versus office action response, or personal documents versus business documents (e.g., for practitioners that work from home). This is a major drawback to, for example, adding first person pronouns to the exclude dictionary.  While you may want them highlighted as misspelled when you are cutting and pasting from an invention disclosure form, they are appropriate to use in your Outlook email to a client.  It also means it is hard to institutionalize and automate the stylistic preferences of attorneys and inventors you regularly interact with.You can get around this limitation by having multiple exclude dictionary text files in the appropriate directory and copying the appropriate exclude dictionary to be Mssp3en.exc as needed and restarting your Microsoft Office applications.

• If you add too many words that you use frequently in documents to your exclude dictionary (e.g., words that you should use with caution), it often allows some really misspelled words to fall through the cracks when spell-checking.
• The exclude dictionary can only contain words not phrases.  Consequently, you cannot enter “prior art” to the exclude dictionary; you would need to add either “prior” or “art” to the exclude dictionary depending on which one you use less frequently.
• On a related note, there are no exceptions to when the words contained in an exclude dictionary are not marked as misspelled.  For example, you cannot fail to highlight the word “all” as misspelled when it is used in the phrase “some or all” or in the same sentence as “in one embodiment” (or words of similar effect).
• You will need to remember to backup your exclude dictionary (and for that matter your custom dictionary in the same directory).  Unlike client files that are usually stored on a shared drive or document management system, local configuration files are rarely backed up in a law firm.  My tip for getting around this annoyance is to use SyncToy to periodically copy the exclude dictionary to your firm’s shared drive — but more on that in a future post.

In the next few days, I will conclude the exclude dictionary series with a post about using similiar functionality in OpenOffice.

• reducing embarrassing typos that “normal” spell checking doesn’t catch;
• making sure inappropriate words aren’t left in when you cut and paste from an invention disclosure form or an inventor(s)’s technical paper; and
• enforcing a preferred spelling when a word could be correctly spelled in multiple ways.

The epitome of the first scenario is typing the word “pubic” instead of “public”.  While both are English words, chances are good that you aren’t writing about anything pubic — unless of course you’re a pharmaceutical/biotech patent attorney.  Thus, you may want to add “pubic” to your exclude dictionary before you make a very public (pun intended) mistake.

Regarding the second scenario, when cutting and pasting from an invention disclosure form or an inventor’s technical paper into a patent application you’re drafting, it is often necessary to rephrase sentences and otherwise edit the content.  For example, you will often need to remove pronouns (”I” ,”We”, “our”) that are in the first person.  You may also need to remove words such as “proposed”.  Accordingly, it is useful to add these to your exclude dictionary to highlight those sentences that you need to edit or words you need to remove.  (However, please see tomorrow’s posting on the drawback of this use.)

In addition, the exclude dictionary can be used to enforce a preferred spelling when multiple spellings are possible.  The classical example for patent attorneys/agents is to mark “cancelled” as misspelled since the USPTO requires the status identifier “Canceled” (with one L) in 37 CFR § 1.121(c) — even if it will still accept “Cancelled”.  However, this is also useful for “judgment” vs. “judgement”, compound computer terms (Is it “e-mail” or “email”? “e-commerce” or “ecommerce”? “home page” or “homepage”? “Web site” or “website”?) and transliterated foreign words.

Tomorrow, I will explore some of the annoyances and drawbacks to using the exclude dictionary.

In the meantime, what other words are in your exclude dictionary? and what words or uses would you add?

For more ideas and rational on potential patent profanity, see these Patently Defined blog postings (Post1 Post2) or these on the Anything Under the Sun Made By Man (Post1 Post2 Post3).

Regardless of the preferences of your company, your client, your partner, or you with regards to what constitutes patent profanity, the exclude dictionary (”exclusion dictionary” in Office 2007) feature of Microsoft Office can help you identify where these words are used in your document so you can reduce or eliminate their use.

Words contained within the exclude dictionary are marked as though they are misspelled even though the word is in the standard spell checking dictionary.

The exclude dictionary is a special text file.  Words are entered in the text file in all lowercase letters with ENTER pressed after each word.

For Office 2000, 2002, and 2003, the file must be named Mssp3en.exc for American English and this file does not exist by default.  It should be saved at C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Proof.

For Office 2007, the exclusion dictionary file, which exists by default, is named ExcludeDictionaryEN0409.lex for American English.  On Vista, the file is located at C:\Users\user name\AppData\Microsoft\UProof and on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is located at C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\UProof.

Keep in mind that this isn’t only useful for documents that you are drafting.  It is also useful when you are reviewing a more junior patent attorney/agent’s work or reviewing a patent for due diligence or invalidity/non-infringement purposes — after copying the text into Microsoft Word.

To get you started, an example exclude dictionary for American English for Office 2002/2003, including words that may not be patent profanity but are included for other reasons discussed tomorrow, is available here.  After downloading (and optionally customizing it in your favorite text editor), place it in the appropriate directory discussed above and restart Office.

For an easy way to split this multi-part PDF file into a PDF file for each bookmark, I wrote a simple batch file and helper program that achieves that with the help of open source pdftk.

The batch file first calls pdftk to dump the bookmark data including bookmark names and starting page numbers.  Then, it parses that output using the helper program to generate another batch file that calls pdftk to split each of the bookmarked sections into separate files named the same as the bookmarked section.

You can call the batch file like:

pdfBmrkSplit.bat <PDF file to be split>

For example,

pdfBmrkSplit.bat 12345678.pdf

The solution isn’t fully polished.  For example, it’s command line-based and assumes: that pdftk and the helper program are either found in the current directory or in the command search path; the bookmarks are all the same level (which is true of most, if not all, PDF files from PAIR); and that the bookmarks all have unique names.

You can download pdftk at: http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/pdftk-1.12.exe.zip and the batch and helper program at: http://www.patenttechtips.org/downloads/pdfBmrkSplit.zip Source code is included.

Unzip the files into the same directory.

Additional uses of pdfTK will be discussed in future posts.

Regardless, given the audience of this blog is very tech-savvy, I wanted to bring it to your attention.  In the USPTO’s own words:

The USPTO is developing a Continuing Education for Practitioners (“CEP”) system for on-line delivery of educational materials to patent practitioners, and is seeking help in piloting the on-line system. The CEP system is built on the recognition that a smoothly operating patent system requires well-qualified USPTO personnel working hand-in-hand with up-to-date patent practitioners. The goal is to increase efficiency, reduce pendency, and improve quality in the patent process.

Full details and instructions for participating are available at: http://www.uspto.gov/main/homepagenews/2008aug18.htm

Yours truly has already emailed OEDonline@uspto.gov to volunteer to participate in the pilot test.  Have you?

With so many patent-related blogs in the blogsphere, you may be wondering why there is a need for yet another blog that busy practitioners don’t have the hours in a day to read. The reason is simple: most blogs geared for patent practitioners do not focus heavily on the technology needed in their day-to-day job and the legal and ethical concerns of that technology. The blogs that come to mind that devote any significant percentage of posts to technology are the Invent Blog and Erik J. Heels’ blog, but that still leaves a large number of topics unexplored.

Thus, this blog was born. Similar postings will not generally be repeated. It would be redundant and who can compete with reference postings such as the Guide to Downloading Patent Copies? Certainly, not me.

Instead, you will hopefully find original and useful posts with the occasional associated download.

Furthermore, this blog is not meant to be a one way street. Please leave comments and otherwise collaborate for the benefit of the profession. Often, for legal, ethical, or personal privacy reasons, I cannot just give you the exact configuration/setting file I actually use. Thus, I need your assistance in creating a plain vanilla one that works for most situations — then, you can download and customize it for your personal circumstances. For example, in upcoming posts, I will discuss the exclude dictionary feature of Microsoft Office. While I will create a small exclude dictionary for download, I will need your feedback on what additional terms should be added. I will then add those terms to the blog-created exclude dictionary.

Finally, while most practitioners use Microsoft Office and other proprietary software, open-source applications will also be discussed when appropriate.

I look forward to your comments and collaboration in the future. Once again, welcome to Patent Tech Tips and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed!