2.1 Documents making up the European patent application 

The physical requirements that the documents making up the European patent application, i.e. request, description, claims, drawings and abstract, must satisfy are set out in Rule 49(2) in conjunction with the decision of the President of the EPO dated 25 November 2022 (OJ EPO 2022, A113). In particular, when amending the application documents, amendments must be typed. Any submissions containing handwritten amendments to application documents – unless they involve graphic symbols and characters and chemical and mathematical formulae – are a formal deficiency (see Art. 2(7) of the decision of the President of the EPO dated 25 November 2022 and Rule 50(1)). The EPO President may lay down further special formal or technical requirements for the filing of documents, in particular with regard to the filing of documents by means of electronic communication (Rule 2(1)). Notes on the preparation of OCR-readable patent applications are published in OJ EPO 1993, 59. The particular requirements relating to drawings are dealt with in A‑IX.