Bert Pool's Farnsworth / Fusor Patents

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Bert Pool recently contacted me to remind me that the URL of his resources of Farnsworth and fusor-related patents has changed to:

http://hot-streamer.com/pool/philo/philo.htm

I note that this change has already been made to the "newbies" portion of the site. I'm not sure where else the links need to be updated. If any body find the old, dead link, please let me know so I can update it.

Thanks,

--PS

[kbonin]

Hello! I've got a question related to this. I got tired of the quality of most of the Philo patent downloads I've seen, so this morning I started grabbing the raw .TIFF images from the USPTO, and am making nice .pdf's with these for easier reading and printing. Only problem, they're a little large - 3386883 is ~3MB. My own public website doesn't have enough storage for all of these, can anyone recommend a good home for them for public access?

[Richard Hester]

I would change the images to *.gif format. They will be a lot more compact than *.tiff images, and still of reasonable quality. *.jpg images will also be compact, but the lines will blur.

[kbonin]

I could do that, but as images they're still a pain to print. I've dropped the .tiffs into a batch pdf converter, after renumbering so the images appear after the text. As a pdf they preserve the full resolution of the .tiff, and are associated in pages for printing. I'm also pretty sure there are pdf viewers on most platforms. Do you (or anyone else) need the tiffs batch converted to gifs?

[Richard Hester]

I use Adobe Acrobat to convert the papers I publish in "files", and a lot of times the line quality isn't so hot for imbedded images. I have to admit, though, that Acrobat is a lot better than the $20 program I was using before.

[kbonin]

I found a great free tool "c42pdf" that converts a directory full of .tiffs to a .pdf VERY fast.

[Richard Hester]

Be careful. I think I used to use that tool, and it gives much blurrier PDFs than Acrobat. I can convert files for you if you will send them to me.

[kbonin]

Greatly appreciate the offer! I haven't ran into any problems yet, there were several bugs mentioned in the version history, may have been fixed, at least for the .tiff format I'm downloading from the USPTO. If I run into more problems, I'll take you up on that offer!

[astios]

I have LOTS of space on my site at astios.com. Let me know if you still need a home for them.

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Re: storage space for patents/illustrations... I like where this thread is leading. Perhaps we can pool our resources to make .pdf files out of some of these patents - all the text, plus all the illustrations, each in its own .pdf file might be very hand, and as Richard points out the fidelity of an Acrobat-rendered file should be entirely adequate without requriing multiple megabytes per image. Rather than 3-MB per image, if we can reduce the important patents down to an MB or two apiece, we can store them here and create a whole new resource.

'zat help?

--PS

[kbonin]

I've converted all of the Farnsworth, Hirsch and Miley patents listed at http://hot-streamer.com/pool/philo/philo.htm to high quality .pdf's using .tiff's downloaded directly from the USPTO, for the older patents I reordered the images so the text pages appear first and the illustration sheets follow. The total size of these 44 files is ~30M.

Here's one for review: Farnsworth-3386883.pdf

This is a ~3M file and as far as I can tell from the prints and review images I'm getting very good quality. If this appears OK, I can deliver the rest of the patent files anywhere appropriate.

[kbonin]

If you would like a copy of these patent files, just give me a target ftp or email address to send them to!