On Wed, 3 Dec 2014 23:54:55 -0500, Michael Black wrote:

Even the US patent office, which has all the patents online, has mere
scans of the patents up to a certain year, it being too much trouble to
turn them into text, while after that certain year, it was done
electronically anyway, so full searches can be done on those later
patents.

Not really. The USPTO has just scans, but if you use Google Patent
search, the PDF files were all fed to an OCR reader and are
searchable. I just tried some really early patents and they were all
searchable. The basic text of the patent, in searchable ASCII, is
also available on the Google Patent search pages:
https://www.google.com/patents/
http://www.google.com/advanced_patent_search
Unfortunately, Google made a mess of the OCR reading on some patents,
so don't expect perfection.

For my own devious purposes, I make sure that all my PDF manuals are
OCR read and searchable. I then use a text search tool, such as Agent
Ransack, to find the manuals or search the contents:
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack
Some manuals arrive in MS Word format, which Agent Ransack can also
handle if I enable the "search MS Office format" checkbox.

It's a long way from the paperless office, but it's a lurch in the
right direction.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558