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PDF Creation and Font Embedding for USPTO Submissions

By Rick Borstein

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 . . .

Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on November 20, 2007 (boomark / email).