The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 06, 1998
Filed:
Oct. 25, 1996
Gregory P Fitzpatrick, Fort Worth, TX (US);
William J Johnson, Flower Mound, TX (US);
Marvin L Williams, Lewisville, TX (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A method and data processing system are disclosed for media boundary traversal. In one embodiment, the invention transforms an electronic data processing file to a printed output that is understandable to humans and then transforms the printed output back to an electronic data processing file without loss of nonprintable characters. The embodiment gets an input file including both printable characters and nonprintable characters; writes the printable characters to an output file; determines locations among the printable characters of the nonprintable characters; transforms the nonprintable characters to printable character sequences; writes the printable character sequences and the locations of the nonprintable characters to an output file separately from the printable characters; and prints the output file. The printable characters of the input file remain understandable by humans in the printed output. The embodiment also comprehends scanning the printed output and performing optical character recognition; transforming the printable character sequences back to nonprintable characters and inserting the nonprintable characters among the printable characters at the written locations; thereby recreating the original input file.