House style & USPTO conventions

Vizspect applies a consistent, USPTO-friendly house style to everything it draws, so figures come out filing-ready. Here’s what it does by default, and what you can change.

The defaults

  • Arial, 12 pt, all-caps text. Uppercase throughout: consistent, and clear of the minimum character-height rule (37 CFR 1.84(p)(3)).
  • Black-and-white line art, no fill. No colour, no shading; utility-patent drawings are line art.
  • 1.0 pt strokes on every outline, connector, and lead line. (37 CFR 1.84(q) permits 0.5 pt; the house default is 1.0 pt because it reads cleanly at every PDF resolution.)
  • Orthogonal connectors. Connectors run horizontal or vertical (right angles); a slanted, diagonal connector is refused by default, following the patent convention. Align the two shapes for a clean run, route it with waypoints, or allow diagonals in Style settings (below).
  • Enforced margins. A placement outside the drawing area is refused. The defaults are the 37 CFR 1.84(g) minimums (top 2.5 cm, left 2.5 cm, right 1.5 cm, bottom 1.0 cm on the portrait sheet, rotated for landscape pages), and the guard uses the stricter of these and the page’s own Print Setup margins.
  • Reference numbers are figure-based and stepped by two, with letter suffixes for repeated parts, placed collision-aware with a lead line up to 1.2″ long. (Full scheme below.)
  • Figure label “FIG. n”, centred at the bottom of each figure page.

Changing the conventions: Style settings

Open Style settings from the tray to change what Vizspect applies: font family, text case (uppercase or as-typed), font size, line weight, whether diagonal connectors are allowed (off by default, see above), the four margins, reference-numbering (start, step, figure-prefixed or sequential, and suffix or distinct numbers for repeated parts), the lead-line length cap, and the figure-label text and position. Changes save to a settings file the server live-reloads; they take effect on the next drawing action, no restart.

A few limits hold no matter what:

  • Black-and-white only: there’s no colour or fill option; figures stay line art.
  • Stroke weight never drops below 0.5 pt (the 1.84(q) floor), even if you set it lower.
  • The window warns you when a choice risks USPTO legibility, like a font under 10 pt (near the 1/8″ minimum) or a stroke under 0.7 pt (may not reproduce at every resolution).

The reference-number scheme

The numbers Vizspect assigns (and what Style settings adjusts) follow a fixed scheme:

  • Start at 100, step by 2 (100, 102, 104, …).
  • The figure number leads: FIG. 2 → 200, 202…; FIG. 10 → 1000, 1002….
  • In flowcharts, START is unnumbered, and numbering begins at the figure base + 2.
  • Repeated parts share a base number with letter suffixes: three of one sensor are 320A, 320B, 320C (not 320 / 322 / 324).

Change the start, step, prefix scheme, and repeated-element style in Style settings (above).