As a follow-up to my post of a few weeks ago about the examiner who asserted that an amendment we filed was non-compliant because he found it difficult to read as a result of the PTO's post-filing processing of the document, in a different case (but in the same art group), I was contacted by a different examiner who also complained that the amendments we filed were hard to read, and asking for a purely black-and-white copy. Which I was happy to prepare and email to him.
The difference between the more recent case and the one I wrote about earlier is that here, the examiner didn't assert that we didn't comply with the rule. I'm sensitive to these things - the USPTO has a predilection for playing fast-and-loose with the rulemaking process and for ignoring its own rules, and the amendment we submitted complied with those rules, so the examiner was wrong to assert that the PTO's garbling of that document after we filed it meant we weren't in compliance.
Now that I know there's an issue for examiners with color amendments because of the PTO's processing software, I'll just prepare b/w documents for submission in order to have one less thing for examiners to complain about. But I will never let an examiner tell me that a pdf filed with changes marked in color is unacceptable, because it's not unacceptable.