Method and system to allow printing compression of documents

Abstract

A print compression method and system reduces the amount of space required to print a document such that less paper is used during the printing of a document. A user defines criteria, which is used to perform document compression. However, the document compression only applies to the form of document being printed. This compression does not affect the document being edited.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0001] The present invention relates to a method and system for printing a document on a page and in particular to a method and system that automatically compresses the amount of information that is to be printed on a page in order to reduce the amount of paper needed to print the information. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] A computer printer is a computer peripheral device that produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and / or graphics, usually on paper) from data stored in a computer connected to it. FIG. 1 illustrates a typical computer and printing system. As shown, the personal computer 2 has a display screen 5, a keyboard 6, a coordinate input device (mouse) 7, and a controller body 8. The controller body 8 is connected to the laser printer 3 by a connecting cable 9. Therefore, various image print data generated by the personal computer 2 can be transmitted to the laser printer 3. [0003] The data received by the printer may be: 1) a string o...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0014] It is a second objective of the present invention to provide a method and system that automatically reduces the amount of print space needed to print out a document.

[0015] It is a third objective of the present invention to provide a method that reformats a document during the printing process such that the document requires less material for printing.

[0016] It is a fourth objective of the present invention to provide a method that can automatically modify the font size of characters in a document in order to reduce the amount of space needed to print that document.

[0017] The core idea of the invention surrounds a dynamic ‘preprinting’ process to be applied to a document such that when the document is printed, it does not need to keep the same formatting as the source document. Consider the example of a person printing a contract for delivery to a customer, the person is very concerned about format and size of characters. The printed document must match exactly the document created in the word processor. In contrast, consider the example of printing forms or reports as a draft copy or for personal consumption, the person now may not care about such formatting. By utilizing this method of printout compression, the person is able to print out such draft views with less paper and in less time.

[0018] In the method of the invention, the user can open a document via some word processing program. The user can then select the print option for printing the document. At this point, the print page could display a printer compression option in the form of an icon. When the user presses this option, the user would then supply print criteria. At this point, the method would search the document and perform reformatting tasks as defined by the print criteria. For example, there may a rule that says: replace [space] [space] with [space]. This operation would replace a double space with a single space. Other criteria could be to reduce the number of carriage returns or reduce the line spacing from double space to single space. At the completion of this reformatting process, the new document is printed. The intent is that the reductions in space will reduce the amount of paper needed to print the document.

Problems solved by technology

The printing of document pages containing little content can result in a needless use of paper.

There is no automated algorithm that can preprocess a document prior to printout that will quickly and reliably improve the efficiency of printout.

Further, the manual process results in a modification of the actual document that would require changing the document back to the version prior to the compression for printing.

However, this feature has limitations in that it only allows very small incremental changes to the printed document.

Further, the changes allowed by this function are also forced to be proportional and has a gating factor in the function to only allow a relatively small amount of change to the document before it will fail.

This current feature would not accomplish nearly as much space savings as desired for many applications, but could be only used for documents which must keep the same formatting when printed.

These solutions do not address the problems with printing documents such that the amount of paper needed for printing is optimized.

With regard to optimizing the paper on which a document is printed, the drawbacks of the known solutions are that they require a manual step for a person to physically modify a document prior to printing.

This takes valuable time and results in the original document being modified.

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