Most of the commercial ink formulations are proprietary, and information on composition and chemical structure of polymers used as dispersants is not readily available, making the unequivocal assignment of the peaks in mass spectra shown in Figure impossible. Although a significant volume of information on ink composition can be found in patent literature, one should be aware that some critical "details are often not mentioned in the patent disclosures" and "patent law does not prevent the inventors, or more accurately the inventors' company intellectual property lawyers, from including in the patent disclosure large volumes of suboptimal alternative approaches that one may cynically believe are meant to slow down competitors by providing false leads." Even a brief search of patent literature reveals a great variety of end groups that are used in preparation of PEG-based dispersants for inkjet ink formulations (several representative examples are shown in Figure ), and some of these structures match the measured masses of polymers in the LDI mass spectra of the ink samples (for example, the low molecular weight distribution of ions in Figure matches the calculated masses for structure I in Figure , polyoxyethylene lauryl ether, which is a component of many commercial dispersants, such as Nikkol DLP-10 ).