Appeal No. 96-1190
Application 07/950,177
identifying unmatched characters as ambiguous characters and
storing these ambiguous characters.
Appellant argues that "[a]t no place in Katsuyama et al
is there any indication that an unrecognized character or
ambiguous character is stored and subsequently used as part of
a search word for retrieval of a document in which the
ambiguous character appeared" (emphasis added) (Br7). The
examiner states that there is no support in claim 17 for the
emphasized language. We agree with the examiner that claim 17
requires storing signals "for use in retrieval of documents,"
which does not positively recite the step of using the
ambiguous character in a subsequent search. Nevertheless, we
agree with the first part of appellant's argument, that "[a]t
no place in Katsuyama et al is there any indication that an
unrecognized character or ambiguous character is stored" (Br7)
and, absent such a teaching, there is no anticipation.
Accordingly the rejection of claims 17-21 is reversed.
Claims 22-26
Claim 22 calls for identifying numerals by comparing
signals representative of images of characters from a source
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