Appeal No. 97-1631 Page 5
Application No. 08/245,267
rejection is improper and will be overturned. In re
Rijckaert, 9 F.3d 1531, 1532, 28 USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir.
1993). It is against this background that we consider the
examiner’s rejection.
At the outset, we observe that the rejection lacks
meaningful analysis. The appellant’s comment about the
examiner’s first rejection, viz., “[t]he Examiner’s rationale
for the rejection is unclear,” (Amendment B at 7), applies
similarly to the instant rejection. The examiner fails to
map the claim language to the disclosures of Guthmueller,
Badgley, or Abe. He also neglects to indicate what language
is missing from any of the references. In addition, the
examiner omits an explanation of how he proposes to combine
the references or why one of ordinary skill in the art would
have been motivated to do so.
The examiner’s rejection repeats the rejected claims and
adds three comments. First, the examiner opines,
“Guthmueller, in Fig. 1 teaches a coded mask for reading bar
code indicia. Coded mask a ‘symbols’ [sic] are shown by
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