Object oriented printing system

Abstract

An object-oriented printing system includes objects that provide query, data transfer, and control methods. The inventive object-oriented printing system communicates with the remainder of the operating system by means of a standard interface such as a grafport and printer drivers are provided for each printer type within the operating system. Thus, an application not only need not worry about the particular printer / computer combination with which it is to operate, but also need not have a built in document formatting capability. The printing system includes objects that provide queries for device identification, optimized imaging, and printer status. Other objects are also provided for data transfer to bracket connections prior to sending and receiving information. Still other objects are provided for cancelling a print job, pausing a job, and clearing out a job. Finally, an object is also provided for supporting multiple streams of communication to an imaging task.

Description

COPYRIGHT NOTIFICATIONPortions of this patent application contain materials that are subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office.FIELD OF THE INVENTIONThe invention generally relates to improvements in computer systems and, more particularly, to operating system software for printing documents.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTIONOne of the most important aspects of a modern computer system is the ability to generate a "hard" copy of textual information or graphics which can be manipulated by the computer, visually displayed and stored. In order to accomplish this task, a computer system generally includes a printing device which is electrically connected to the computer system and controlled by it in order to generate a permanent image on a selected medium. Examples of printing devices in common use are dot matrix, ink jet and las...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The foregoing problems are overcome and the foregoing object is achieved in an illustrative embodiment of the invention in which an object-oriented printing interface includes document grouping or folio objects which,

Problems solved by technology

Therefore, application program developers had to provide larger and larger numbers of printer drivers with each application program, resulting in wasted time and effort and wasted disk space to hold the drivers, only one or two of which were of interest to any particular user.

Unfortunately, if a user purchased an application program and it did not include a printer driver which could control the printer which the user owned, unpredictable operation occurred, resulting in program returns and user dissatisfaction.

Consequently, each application program developer had to spend time developing programs to implement common printing functions which programs were specific to each application program, thereby resulting in duplicated effort and wasted time.

However, it still suffers from the drawback that, if desired, high level printing capabilities such as pagination and page composition must still be designed into each application program, thereby duplicating program code and wasting programming resources.

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