If you use a Mac, you might have run into problems when trying to view images of patents filed with the US Patent Office. The images are in TIFF format, and might not load properly in the browsers you’re using.

For me, I had a Quicktime logo flash for a couple seconds, before disappearing, leaving only a white screen. After searching for quite some time, I found pat2pdf, a free web application that allows you to download patents as PDF documents.

It actually works quite well, and is much easier than the downloadable apps that help you turn patents into PDFs.

pat2pdf