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BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Friday, January 09, 2004Chasing the wild goose with VBA running on MS-Word?In a recent article Mr. Paul Brewin of EPO had written: "[...] waiting for the market to produce an easy to use word processor that could also create XML documents has turned out to be a wild goose chase". Indeed. Well said.
But what has happened until now? The EPO as well as the German Patent and Trade Mark Office both have created independently from each other some kind of a word processor capable of creating XML documents: The EPO has published PatXML. PatXML creates a template within Word, conforming to EPC/PCT articles and rules, which gives assistance when preparing patent applications. In addition to comprehensive help screens, PatXML also features "pop-up" screens helping to enter data such as patent citations. Moreover, it is possible to copy, cut and paste or import text and images from existing documents (not only in Word format) into PatXML. The data will be converted to XML and all images will also be converted to a standard format with links inside the XML text data - all of this hidden from the user.
The German Patent and Trade Mark Office has published similar MS-Word templates.
What does that mean? So, well, in terms of IT language I would say that both Offices have seen a need to create some kind of a "word processor that [can] also create XML documents". How to accomplish this? The "normal" way might have been to select a general purpose programming language like C++ or Java and starting with an implementation of such XML authoring tool. But doing so from the very scratch would surely be rather expensive. So both Offices thought twice and decided to select another programming platform which brings more advanced functionality for word processing, namely the "Visual Basic for Applications" (VBA) script language that comes with MS-Word.
On the one side, this decision looks very attractive for the Offices: The costs for purchasing the platform environment are easily shifted to the applicant or patent professional, most of them already having copies of MS-Word running in their offices. Moreover, there is also a psychological momentum: The users are accustomed to the "look and feel" of that software and will not feel bewildered by some novel XML engine. This way the Offices can easily promote electronic filing on the basis of XML character encoded data helping to reduce costs by eliminating any costly OCR proofreading steps. However, on the other side, the question has to be asked whether VBA in MS-Word is really a well-suited platform for creating XML authoring tools. I am in doubt. At least doing so means to give a particular software vendor a competitive advantage which can hardly be justified. The future use of such VBA-based XML tools will teach us more about the technical reliability and stability of the approach taken by the Offices. There would have been alternatives, e.g. a development on the basis of OpenOffice. Furthermore, there are a lot of platform -independent XML tools written in Java available.
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