Appeal No. 96-1190
Application 07/950,177
characters; and storing the signals representative of images
of ambiguous characters for use in retrieval of documents in
which the ambiguous characters appeared."
The examiner states (FR7; EA5):
Where the patterns of electrical signals forming lexicons
of images of both character fonts and non-character
shapes stored in the computer memory contains ambiguous
characters for use in retrieval of documents in which the
ambiguous character appeared (refer to column 15, line 64
through column 16, line 12). The thinning or thickening
of characters in memory generates distorted characters
which corresponds to applicant's ambiguous characters.
Although the initial capital letter and the final period
make the first sentence above a typographical sentence, it is
not a grammatical sentence because the word "where" turns the
words into a dependent clause--a fragment. The idea intended
to be conveyed is incomplete. We have read Katsuyama,
column 15, line 64 through column 16, line 12, but fail to
understand how it anticipates the claimed steps. The
referenced portion of Katsuyama discusses carrying out a
thickening/thinning operation governed by a parameter F and a
magnification/reduction operation governed by a scale
parameter S. The combination of parameters which provides the
smallest "city block distance" are the optimum parameters for
character recognition. Katsuyama says nothing about what
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