Appeal No. 95-3744
Application 08/084,838
For reasons noted above, Yanker in no way suggests the scrolling of data in a composite
direction as required by independent claims 1 and 10. Even though additional references are cited
against the dependent claims, none of the additional references makes up for the basic deficiency
in the Yanker teaching. Therefore, we do not sustain any of the rejections made by the examiner.
As we noted supra, the examiner cited a patent to Paal but never applied it in the rejections.
Paal was first cited in the final rejection with the comment “Paal et al., U.S. Patent No. 5,263,134,
teaches two-dimensional scrolling” [page 10]. We agree that Paal teaches simultaneous two-
dimensional scrolling along any composite direction. For example, Paal teaches that a symbol 52
can be moved in a composite direction, and the active window 53 will dynamically scroll in the
same direction that the object is moved [column 10, line 64 to column 11, line 26]. In view of our
discussion of the examiner’s rejections above, it is clear that Paal represents the closest prior art
cited by the examiner. Thus, it would appear that any appropriate rejections on this record should
be based upon Paal as the principal reference.
Having made this observation, we simply invite the examiner to consider whether any of the
pending claims are obvious in view of all the cited prior art. Since appellant has argued essentially
every limitation of the claims as patentably distinguishing over the applied prior art, we do not
wish to prejudge the issue of obvousness by initiating a rejection before appellant has
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