Computer based publishing in the Australian patent office

The Australian Patent Office has a legislative requirement to publish particulars of patent, trade mark and design activity within Australia. Drawings, text, images and other data for trade marks, patents and designs are printed weekly in the Official Journals (Gazettes). In 1985/86 the Office investigated the possibilities of computer based processing for its regular weekly publications. The investigation considered how best to hold and retrieve text data, how patent, trade mark and design images might be processed and what computer based publishing software and hardware could be used to lower overall Office publishing costs. Following the investigation the Australian Patent Office developed a publishing system using ADABAS to hold text data, OLIVETTI's FILENET optical disk system to hold images, the XEROX 'XICS' software system to produce typesetting masters and a XEROX 9700 laser printer to print high quality output. On 1 January 1987 the patent and trademarks weekly journals were issued for the first time using a computer database of text for both journals and of images for the trademark journal. The text and images are merged by the XICS typesetting package and printed on the XEROX 9700 laser printer. The new publications are easier to produce, are of a higher quality and have been well received by subscribers. As a result of the computerisation the Office's publication costs for the Journals have been reduced substantially. This article describes how this system was developed and implemented, the benefits achieved by the Office and identifies likely future directions.