Public Comments

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3713 Edmonton Way, Concord, CA 94520

RE: Public Comment on 0651-0089 (DOCX Submission Requirements).
To whom it may concern:
Thank you for the opportunity to provide a public comment regarding the DOCX
submission requirements for filing patent applications at the USPTO. To provide some
background, I have been a registered patent attorney for almost 30 years, and I am a frequent
user of the USPTO’s Patent Center.
At Table 1 of this request for public comments, the USPTO estimates the time burden of
DOCX filing at “0.5 hours (30 minutes).” In my experience, 30 minutes is the minimum time
required to prepare a document for filing in DOCX format instead of PDF format, not the
average or the mean time required. I routinely encounter several issues with filing DOCX
documents.
First, Patent Center generates a feedback document upon filing a patent application in
DOCX. This is appreciated when there are genuine problems with the DOCX document.
However, every single time I file, the feedback document tells me that there are problems with
multiple items. Almost always, the feedback document states that the paragraph numbers are not
consecutive, or include duplicate numbers. This feedback has never once been correct. Almost
always, the feedback document states that one of the claims is missing a period, that there is
improper dependency, that a claim number is missing, or that a claim number is duplicated. This
feedback is almost never correct.
It would be foolish to ignore the feedback document. After I open the feedback
document, I review the identified issues. That review, by itself, takes an average of 30 minutes
itself. The vast majority of the time, the feedback is simply incorrect, due to the unreliability of
the feedback document, and whatever software generates the document on the Patent Center
side. The time spent reviewing nonexistent issues identified in the feedback document needs to
be accounted for as part of the time burden of DOCX filing.

3713 Edmonton Way, Concord, CA 94520

Second, as a veteran filer through the old EFS-Web system, I am extremely familiar with
non-embedded font errors. One advantage of DOCX filing was supposed to be the end of those
frustrating errors. I only use one font for USPTO filings of any kind; my patent applications are
not a patchwork of Arial and Comic Sans. However, on occasion, I receive a non-embedded font
error when submitting a DOCX document. Finding and fixing that error can take 15-60 minutes,
by itself.
Third, when equations are presented in a patent specification, it now takes significant
time to format those equations in a manner in a DOCX document. Equations in a DOCX
document are very susceptible to being shown differently on different computers, particularly on
different computers using different word processing software to create and/or read DOCX files.
Having an equation in a patent application that is displayed differently to an examiner than what
I typed into the document can be fatal to the applicant’s hopes to obtain a patent. The burden for
formatting equations in a DOCX document, in a manner in which I have the most hope for them
to survive for the Examiner to see them, is often two to three hours.
The problem that a DOCX document is displayed in one way to a user on one computer,
and in a different way to a different user on a different computer, results from the fact that
DOCX is not a standard. It is a Microsoft file type. For this reason, different DOCX
implementations on different machines running different versions of operating software display
different results. ISO 29500 nominally governs DOCX files. However, that standard is split into
two conformance classes: strict and transitional. “Strict was meant to be the future and
Transitional the temporary bridge. Two decades after standardisation, Transitional remains what
Office produces, what users receive, and what any competing implementation must support to be
useful. The clean standard exists on paper. The standard that exists in practice — and that
Microsoft Office produces by default — is the messy one.” (“A Standard in Name Only: What
OOXML Transitional Tells Us About Format Sovereignty,” Italo Vignoli (2026), at
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/06/02/a-standard-in-name-only/).
The time burden to submit patent applications as DOCX documents, as opposed to PDF
documents, is significantly more than the 30 minutes that has been estimated by the USPTO.

3713 Edmonton Way, Concord, CA 94520

Based on my own experience, I estimate that time burden to be 90 to 120 minutes. The USPTO
time burden estimate of 30 minutes is unreasonably low, and should be revised to account for the
amount of time actually required for applicants to file patent applications in DOCX format.
I appreciate and support the goal of reducing the hours that USPTO hours have to spend
on tedious and menial work creating and proofing documents for publication and issue. In my
opinion, that goal is much better served by requiring document submission in a commonly-used
file format that follows well-known standards, such as PDF/A, which is defined and controlled
by ISO 19005. PDF/A also provides for easy text extraction without scanning or optical
character recognition. There are alternatives that accomplish the goal of greater efficiency that
do not lock the USPTO and its customers into a proprietary file format that produces
unpredictable results on different computers. Further, steps toward reaching that common goal
have to reflect the actual time burden on applicants, which the current estimate of 30 minutes
does not.
Thank you for considering my comments.

Respectfully submitted,
Brian Schar
Reg. No. 45,076
CrossPond Law
3713 Edmonton Way
Concord, California 94520