Patent Application Flowchart Drafting Tools

To generate flowcharts and their text descriptions, perform the following steps:

1. Open Patent Drafting Settings menu

   From the ClaimMaster tab, click on the Patent Drafting Tools menu, then click on Generate Flowcharts + Descriptions from Method Claims :

   

2. Select One or More Base Method Claims

   Select one or more of the claims to use as the base for the generated patent application flowchart. To help with the claim selection, if you hover over any claim number in the claim tree, you will be able to review the text of the claim in the small tooltip window that appears below the claim number.
   

   If you select more than one independent claim, ClaimMaster will create a separate flowchart/description for each selected group of claims (i.e., independent + any of its dependents). You can navigate between claim groups using these tabs in the preview window:

   

3. Generate Flowcharts (Figures)

   For each claim group, you can specify the preferred figure number. All steps will be numbered as multiples of the specified figure number (e.g., 3), incremented by the specified fixed step (e.g., 302, 304, 306, etc). You can also specify the preferred step increment (default value is 2). Steps in the flowcharts will be incremented based on the selected increment. For example, if the current figure number is set to 3 and step increment is set to 5, steps will be numbered as 305, 310, 315, and so on.

   The text section below will let preview and edit the draft flowchart. For example, you can edit step numbers and any limitation text to have your changes reflected in the generated flowcharts. The edited text is what will be used for filling-out the final flowchart.

   

   Once you are satisfied with the preview of the generated patent application flowchart, proceed to insert the generate the actual flowchart figure by clicking the Generate Flowchart (s) button. Here you can specify whether to output the chart in Powerpoint or Visio format. In addition, you can specify whether to place step numbers inside or outside boxes, whether to include the “Start” bubble in the beginning of the flowchart, and also adjust the relative box width to page width ratio.

4. Generate Corresponding Flowchart Description(s)

   Here you can set a number of parameters for generating one or more of the textual flowchart descriptions. In particular, you can set the template name as well as some of the values for the variables used to populate the template text (e.g., device name and # for the step descriptions). You’ll see the preview of the generated text appear in the window below and you can make your edits directly in the preview window.

   Once you are satisfied with the preview of the generated flowchart descriptions, proceed to insert the generated descriptions into the document. You’ll do this by clicking the Insert Description(s) button. Prior to insertion, you can also specify whether to insert the generated text into the currently open document (at the current cursor location) or into a new document. Here you can also choose to insert the pre-configured flowchart description section that includes a header (i.e., best used for documents that do not include section replacement fields).

   

5. Proceed to Next Steps (Optional)

   After you insert the generated Flowchart description section, you can either close the flowchart tool or click on the Next Steps button to proceed inserting other sections into the shell using the built-in workflow. Note that if a Save directory is specified, all generated figures and their corresponding text descriptions will be saved to that directory.