What about linking to PDFs?

For a variety of reasons, we would prefer that you not link directly to PDFs. If you link to the full-text page (see above), the PDF is still only a click away.

There are several reasons not to link to PDFs. First, PDFs may be LARGE. There are patents that are hundreds of pages long. In such a case, the PDF would be many megs. If the user really wants the PDF, that's fine and they can always click through to it. But, if the text would have served their purposes, getting the PDF is a lot of wasted downloading time. Second, for technical reasons we sometimes change the way our site handles the PDFs. The images we store take many TERABYTES (a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes) of disk space, and we are always on the lookout for ways to store our images more efficiently. This could conceivably mean that, due to programming changes, links to PDFs will not always be static, while the link structure of the full-text files will never change.