The website of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
<http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html>
is not the friendliest site on the web, especially for Mac users who
want to download patent images. In general, if I locate a specific
patent, click on the Images link for that patent, and select an
individual page, it sometimes seems as if it can take forever for the
image to actually appear.
By trial and error, however, I've discovered that once I'm on the Images
page for a given patent and have picked a specific page (using Netscape
7 in my case), I can chose "Save As Complete Web Page" and more or less
instantaneously get a downloaded index page plus a folder full of
graphics files. The patent image of interest in this folder is always
named "a.jfx" and seems to be some variation on a TIFF file.
None of my favorite graphics apps (GraphicConverter, Photoshop,
Illustrator, and iView MediaPro) seem to know about this format (though
GC will open and convert it). Anyone have more information about this
format? Or, a better way to get free patent images quickly?
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