For rather longer than is decent, the UK IPO has been forcing us to use an opposition form that was only available as a PDF and not an editable one at that. particularly frustrating for those SOLO practitioners who act as our own secretaries So thank you very muchfor the new form - that they have put on to their website here. I am delighted that there is a WORD version.
We had hoped that there would be a nice online form for doing oppositions like the new TM3, but perhaps that will come after the downtime at the weekend...
Anyway, that's one less thing we can complain about to the UK IPO representatives when we arrive in Berlin. I do hope they and you will be taking the opportunity to go to the Bloggers reception on Monday evening at 1 Potsdamer Platz - see the earlier post
Interesting post. We have the same situation at Cantab IP with PCT forms, which are only available in PDF format (albiet also in an editable version).
ReplyDeleteWe use data merge ("mail merge") a lot in our business; everything is in a database and the appropriate record is exported and merged into a template document. Most of the time it works very well, and saves a lot of time (especially in a solo practice where, one is king but also servant, footman, maid, etc).
Unfortunately, mail merge only works with Word templates, not PDF templates.
What we do is copy the PDF page image and paste it into Word (or whatever editing program you use). Make sure you set the image to be behind the text (i.e., not inline). You can then set up text boxes and position them at the appropriate locations with the PDF image as background. You then enter the text in the appropriate text boxes.
It's good that UKIPO is finally supplying the forms in Word format, but you can use this tip for other PDF forms that have not been converted officially.
Regards,
Chong-Yee