Handwriting no more

Handwritten amended pages are no longer acceptable at the European Patent Office (EPO), as of 1 January. Under the European Patent Convention, applicants were required to submit typed or printed descriptions, claims and abstracts but handwritten amended pages were admissible during proceedings, and were common during oral proceedings. However, the EPO has now stopped this practice as it intends to produce the text of the patent electronically, and therefore needs all pages in a form that can be processed.