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jason2845027
jason2845027
Participant
February 27, 2018
Question

Help Restoring Old Handwritten Patent for Legibility

  • February 27, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 584 views

Hello All!

I've been doing some research and came across a patent that I need to be able to read:

http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=X0007758

The first page is obviously easy to use as it is a simple drawing. The second through fourth pages; however, are almost impossible to read in their current state. My skills in Photoshop are insufficient to render this into a legible set of pages, so I'm really hoping someone on here is willing and capable of helping enhance it so I can read it and utilize the text of the patent in my research. This would likely be the first time the patent has been read since the digital age, if not for 100 or more years. I'm not looking for it to look great for printing or display, only for the sole purpose of reading it.

Thank you so much for any help! I sincerely appreciate it.

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Rista12
Rista12
Participating Frequently
February 28, 2018

Rista12
Rista12
Participating Frequently
February 28, 2018

Jason,  I'm not sure how legible this really makes it, but it's just a quick process and you may wish to try it.

I used a screenshot of your link and doubled the size before I started.  That may help with the original also.

Hope this helps.

mglush
Community Expert
mglushCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 27, 2018

I've tried a couple of options and here is the problem -- when it was digitized, it was scanned as bitmap so all of the texture of the paper came as little black dots. If they were grayscale, it would be more accessible.

A manual way to handle it would be to paint with white the areas around the type, but that would be a massive amount of time. I've tried selecting the text and expanding the selection so I could fill it with white, but that is not working either.

I don't have a solution for you yet, but I will keep trying.

I know this isn't the answer, but when I was working on it, I blew up the type really large and was able to read it word by word. If we can't figure out a way to separate the dots from the text and extract the text, al least you might be able to read the text blown up to decipher it.

We'll keep trying.

mglush
Community Expert
mglushCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 27, 2018

Is there a gray scale version that we might have access to?

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