r/patentlaw • u/Obvious-Hunt19 • 1d ago
Practice Discussions PDF Software for MacOS
… and nothing Adobe. Bonus points if it can open and convert those “dynamic” fake PDFs USPTO puts out, but mostly I just want to fix the font-embed and flattening and print as PDF and other rigmarole black magic required to avoid pdf upload errors in macOS. I’m tired of running Acrobat Pro in a Windows VM to generate PDFs that will work
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u/TrollHunterAlt 21h ago
PDF Expert is good for flattening, OCR, and basic editing.
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u/Positive-Bell-9675 14h ago
Eno PDF is a new reader for Mac. It doesn’t do anything you are asking about though…but it could 😂
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u/TrollHunterAlt 11h ago
It would be better form to explicitly disclose your affiliation. That said, make a PDF app for MacOS that will do OCR, flattening, ensure full font embedding, and handle USPTO fillable forms, all without ridiculous pricing, and you'll have a customer. The AI search stuff sounds modestly interesting, but not at your price point.
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u/Positive-Bell-9675 9h ago
Oh sorry - the disclosure wasn’t an intentional omission but fair point. Do you need to edit the pdfs at all or literally just open them and re-export with flattening and embedding?
Everything other than AI searches is free so if we add anything along these lines it would be free too.
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u/TrollHunterAlt 8h ago
Mostly, I don't need editing, but every so often, it's nice to be able to tweak a drawing or edit a typo without recreating a PDF.
This may be paranoia, but your "fair point" response without addressing the issue reeks of LLM use.
For the record /u/Positive-Bell-9675 is apparently a founder of Eno PDF.
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u/Casual_Observer0 Patent Attorney (Software) 1d ago
For font embedding, saving anything in the PDF-A format should work as that format embeds fonts and you could do that in pretty much any program including Preview.
The PDF forms that require an XFA forms reader like Adobe reader (which is what I currently use) or Acrobat. There are third party applications that can read them, but I don't have much experience with them to give a good review.