Appeal No. 2003-0237
Application No. 09/157,895
OPINION
We reverse the aforementioned rejections. We need to
address only the independent claims, i.e., claims 1, 11, 18
and 20.
Claims 1 and 11
The appellants’ claims 1 and 11 require that a minidriver
contains a text based characterization of an output device. It
is proper to use the specification to interpret what the
appellants mean by a word or phrase, such as “text based”, in a
claim. See In re Morris, 127 F.3d 1048, 1053-56, 44 USPQ2d 1023,
1027-30 (Fed. Cir. 1997). The specification indicates that by
“text based” the appellants mean that the minidriver
characterizes the output device using human-readable text
characters that have not been compiled into binary format
(page 3, line 26 - page 4, line 10; page 5, lines 12-13; page 6,
lines 16-18; page 69, lines 10-11; page 70, lines 3-5; page 71,
lines 2-11).
Shaw discloses minidrivers (203) and a universal driver
(UniDriver 204, figure 2). “In a preferred embodiment, each
device driver function of the minidriver implementation (except
for an initialization function) forwards its invocation to an
3
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