I've been working on some tools that integrate with USPTO (both from the application side and the validation side) for quite a few years now and they've been making a TON of formatting changes recently. A lot of their PDF forms have changed, they're requiring XML versions of all data we submit, they're handling classifications differently, etc. Their process always felt like it was stuck in the past and being handled manually by humans before and now it feels like they're moving everything toward automated intake and initial reviews. I imagine this change is for the same reasons, and that's a hefty fee to force it.

This also likely means I will need to rework our systems to spit out docx instead of/in addition to PDFs, which will be a nightmare to do. So that's fun.