314 results about "Page description language" patented technology

A method and apparatus which generates a copy of the print data file for a print job and utilizes the copied data file to calculate the amount of marking material required to print the print job while allowing the processing of the print job to proceed without interruption or delay. A print server in a computer or printing system receives print jobs originating at one or more host computers. At the print server the print job data file is copied and a separate task using the copy calculates the amount of marking material required to print the print job proceeds in the print server background in parallel with the conventional processing of the print job. The print job file is converted to a universal file format prior to being transmitted to the print server. Once the print job in universal file format is copied for the task of calculating the amount of marking material required to print the print job, the universal file format file is converted to a page description language file prior to print job processing and transmission to an imaging device.

There is provided an information sharing processing method comprising the steps of a page display processing step for acquiring a file from a predetermined server on a network and displaying the file as a page, wherein the file is described in a predetermined page description language and includes a description of link information to another file on the network; a common-screen display processing step for displaying an icon representing a user at a position on a common screen shared with the user and displaying a message issued by the user making an access to the same page as the page displayed at the page display processing step, wherein information on the position and the message are specified by the user in shared data transmitted by the user by way of a shared server on the network; and a screen superposition processing step for superposing the common screen displayed at the common-screen display processing step on the page displayed at the page display processing step. Accordingly, it is possible to make an access to the web page with ease while participating a chat. In addition, any one of the users is capable of immediately knowing whether the other user is making an access to the same web page.

An image processing method and system is provided wherein a plurality of processors perform a conversion process from a page description language format of data into raster image data, and a printing engine which continuously receives color image data having at least three color components in page unit and prints the at least three color components of color image data on a recording medium in parallel at a constant speed. A page description language format of data is received that includes at least two of the at least three color components as at least an object constituting the page description format data, the page description language format of data is analyzed and, based on the analysis, each color component data of the object in the received data is assigned to each processor such that the plurality of processors perform the conversion processes of the at least two of the at least three color components in parallel thereby producing raster image data of each color component from the plurality of processors to the printing engine in parallel.

A method and computer program product for reflowing a PDL page without using the original application used to create the PDL page. The method and computer program product include receive a page represented in a page description language, the page including a plurality of page objects, and changing one or both of a size of the page and a size of one or more of the page objects, while maintaining spatial relationships between the page objects.

The present invention is useful for assembling a book. The inventive method includes the steps of specifying pagination information including an indication of whether a page is to be selectively included in the book, determining whether the page is to be assembled into the book based on the pagination information, and generating page description language instructions for production of the book in accordance with the pagination information.

A data processing system and method of processing format parameters of a variable data area within a base document are described. According to the present invention, a base document defined by a data set stored within the data processing system is created utilizing a user application. In response to identification of a portion of the base document as a variable data area, at least one page description language comment statement associated with the variable data area is inserted within the data set. In response to specification of format parameters for the variable data area, the format parameters of the variable data area are encoded within the comment statement. In one embodiment, an identifier of selected variable data to be presented within the variable data area is also encoded within the comment statement.

A drawing processing circuit includes a plurality of rasterizing means capable of executing rasterizing processes in parallel. Each rasterizing means includes a dynamic reconfigurable processor. Data described by a page description language is received, analyzed, and converted into intermediate data for each drawn object. Before execution of a rasterizing process, scheduling data of reconfiguration of the processor is generated by estimating the process time of each rasterizing process on the basis of the intermediate data. The plurality of rasterizing means rasterize the data to bitmap data on the basis of the intermediate data while reconfiguring the processor on the basis of the generated scheduling data. In addition, the process time of each of the plurality of rasterizing means is determined on the basis of the scheduling data. The scheduling data is corrected so as to make the process times of the plurality of rasterizing means substantially equal. With this arrangement, a method of drawing image, which reduces the waste of hardware resources and perform a high-speed drawing process, a circuit thereof, and a print control apparatus are provided.

A process is provided to prepare production data for a print job. In one embodiment of the present invention, the production data includes an electronic document defined by a page description language (PDL). The electronic document is stored in a PDL image file, such as a Postscript file, a PDF file, or the like. A still image proxy, which may be a JPEG file, a GIF file, a PNG file, or the like, is created of the PDL image file. An image display of the still image proxy is electronically manipulated. Information about the manipulations are recorded and subsequently used to revise the PDL image file so as to match the PDL image file to the manipulations made to the image display of the still image proxy.

A method for dynamically augmenting printer drivers, by providing a GUI for selecting plug-in modules, and dynamically adding the selected plug-in modules. Addition and deletion of plug-in modules do not require uninstallation and reinstallation of the currently installed printer driver. Plug-in modules implement optional or model-specific functionalities, including feature sets, Page Description Languages (PDLs), and Renders. Settings for plug-in modules are stored in heap-allocated private devmode structures, which may be deallocated when plug-in modules are removed. Methods include copying DLL files to a printer system folder, checking compatibility of the plug-in DLL files, adding registry entries, plug-in module installing itself, adding GUI tabs, and downloading plug-in modules stored at a remote storage over the network. In an embodiment, registry entries are checked for any plug-in modules, and the corresponding DLL files are copied from a server to a client.

A method and system to convert an electronic image file described in a page description language containing both contone and non-contone image objects to an intermediate binary format image. The intermediate format image separately encodes the contone and non-contone image objects. The contone image objects are edge-tagged. Prior to printing, the intermediate binary format page image is separated into the contone and non-contone image objects. The contone image objects are converted back to a contone form using the edge tagging to modify the filter weights of a digital filter. The non-contone image objects are converted to contone form by means of a pattern matching scheme.

A method and system to convert an image described in a page description language to a contone image. The contone image is halftoned and encoded to generate image data including edge tag data and image data. A tagged state value of each pixel of image data within a predefined neighborhood of pixels is determined. The image data is filtered using a predetermined set of filter weighting values wherein each pixel of image data within the predefined neighborhood of pixels has an associated filter weighting value. A predetermined filtered image value is assigned to each pixel having a tagged state indicating an edge pixel. A summation of all filtered image values for the predefined neighborhood of pixels is assigned when the tagged state of the pixel is a non-edge pixel.

The present disclosure relates to exception page programming, and, in particular, to a system and method for providing an exception page programming tool for use with a page description language file where the exception page programming tool can display exception page programming within the context of a print job.

The present disclosure relates to exception page programming, and, in particular, to a system and method for providing an exception page programming tool for use with a page description language file where the exception page programming tool can display exception page programming within the context of a print job.

A computer based printing system, comprised of one or more print drivers, a spooler, print processor, two or more printing devices and optionally one or more print servers. The system results in reducing uneven distribution of load across printers for document splitting in a cluster printing environment, by weighting each page for the approximate proportional load required for the respective printer(s) to PDL interpretation / RIP. The system has the advantage of not requiring additional hardware, firmware, or server side software, by having the load calculated, splitting and distribution in the client side print subsystem. The method of the invention includes a method of distributing a print job having plural pages to plural printers, wherein each printer has a printer description language interface, selecting a cluster printing option and the printers to be used during distributed printing; analyzing the print job to estimate print times for each page of the print job; assigning a print job weight to each page as a function of the page's proportional page description language / raster image process time; and balancing a page distribution to each selected printer as a function of a printer's rated speed to have the distributed print job substantially simultaneously complete on each selected printer.

A secure printing method includes providing a user terminal with a user interface. The user terminal and interface enable a user to select a secure printing mode for printing a document. In the secure printing mode, a secure print job stored in the user terminal is released through execution of a secure release procedure. In this way, the document can be printed at a selected one of a plurality of designated printers. When a user selects the secure printing mode, page description language data for the secure print job is generated in a format, or multiple formats, compatible with the designated printers. The page description language data is stored at the user terminal and a request is communicated to each of the designated printers. The request identifies the secure print job, but the job itself is not transmitted with the request. When the predefined secure release procedure is executed, the secure printjob is released to a selected printer.

A method and apparatus for efficient processing a page description language (“PDL”) data stream lacking page independence is described. The method and apparatus includes applying a single parsing pass for a PDL job and detecting PDL job producers by creator sniffer (83). Shared resources in the PDL job are detected by resource sniffer (85). Page boundaries in the PDL job are detected by page data sniffer (84) and an organized representation (63) is produced without rearranging data and resources in the PDL job. The system efficiently organizes PDL stream into pages, data and resources without rearranging the stream. The organized data can be efficiently submitted to plurality of PDL processors (65).

The invention generates a page description language compliant data stream, that has been pre-designed and pre-processed to create unique and predictable page element ordering, overlay layout, and for splitting large page elements into multiple independent elements. In this way, multiple processors can be used to render the document without merging the data stream.

The disclosed embodiments provide a system that facilitates driverless printing. This system includes a discovery component configured to identify accessible printers and to facilitate selection of an accessible printer, wherein the discovery component is also configured to obtain capability information from accessible printers. The system also includes a transport component configured to transport data to the selected printer, wherein the transport component is also configured to obtain capability information from the selected printer. Finally, the system includes a page-description-language component configured to generate printer data for the selected printer based on obtained capability information for the selected printer.

A system and method are provided for print job fingerprinting in a print job generation system. The method comprises: at a print job generation system, accepting an electronically formatted document with print instructions; accepting fingerprint information; generating a fingerprint image from the fingerprint information; supplying a fingerprinted print job; and, generating a raster image of the fingerprinted print job. For example, the fingerprinted print job may be sent, via a print subsystem, to a printer that creates a raster image of the fingerprinted print job and generates a copy of the document, with the fingerprint image. The fingerprinted print job is generated in a format such as a journaled print job, page description language (PDL), machine-dependent raster image data, or machine independent bitmap data. The image can be a marking such as a barcode, alpha-numeric text, watermark, font set, or steganographic image.

One particular object of the present invention is to facilitate high quality reproduction for an image combining an image based on rendered PDL commands and a scanned image without considering whether the processed pixel is a portion of the scanned image or a portion of the image base on rendered PDL commands. So the present invention relates to an image processing apparatus which include an inputting unit for inputting image data described by a command corresponding to each part of an image, an interpreting unit for interpreting the command to form a bitmap image and to output attribute information; a scanning unit for scanning an image to output color image data; a generating unit for generating flag data indicating attributions of the image based on the color image data and indicating the pixel preferring the same image process as the pixel based on the attribute information; a first combining unit for combining the color image data and the bitmap image; and a second combining unit for combining the flag data and the attribute information of the command.

A method is provided for creating a print container with a series of resident fixed documents. The method opens a user interface (UI). Using the UI, a first plurality of elements stored in memory is selected and a print container is created. The print container preserves a second plurality of elements as separate entities in the print container. For example, a print container may have an element hierarchy of jobs in the print container, fixed documents in a job, and fixed pages in a fixed document may be created. Elements are defined as print containers, fixed documents, application-specific documents, page description language (PDL) documents, extensible markup language (XML) paper specification (XPS) fixed documents, or combinations of the above-mentioned elements. In one aspect, the selected elements are extensible markup language (XML) paper specification (XPS) fixed documents, which are preserved as separate entities in an XPS container.

Systems and methods are described that facilitate real-time personalization of an electronic image by overlaying a text string on a planar surface of an object in the electronic image. A linear or affine transform is executed on a selected text string to position the text string in a reference rectangle or text box. A non-linear or projective transform is applied to the rectangular text box to project the box into a user-defined quadrilateral on the planar surface in the image. A page description language (PDL) file is generated and includes the transformed quadrilateral text box overlaid on the electronic image. At print-time, a database (e.g., a spreadsheet or the like) containing multiple text strings is read, once for each text string, and multiple images are printed. Each printed image has one of the text strings overlaid thereon, on the planar surface defined by the quadrilateral.

An intermediate-language creating unit analyzes a page description language to create an intermediate language having information of all CMYK printing versions. An intermediate-language storing unit stores the intermediate language created. A drawing-version setting unit sets each of the CMYK printing versions to be drawn with the intermediate language. An image-data creating unit analyzes the intermediate language stored to create image data for at least one printing version for creating the image data. An image-data storing unit stores the image data created. A drawing-version control unit recognizes the printing version to be drawn set by the drawing-version setting unit, and reads the intermediate language stored for a plurality of times.

This invention is directed to a method and apparatus for raster image processing which allows access to the page buffer during raster image processing. The method and apparatus of the present invention allow for virtually every page presented to the raster image processor to be printed with available memory. In addition, the method and apparatus for raster image processing of the present invention significantly reduces the bandwidth required between the raster image processor and the raster image processor manager. In addition, the method and apparatus for raster image processing of the present invention has equal or better performance than those methods or apparatuses that use display lists. Further, the method and apparatus of the present invention support the use of tag data and multiple page description languages.

Page description language data are imposed according to entered imposition information. The imposed page description language data are converted into raster-format data by an RIP process. Page data depending on a plurality of page areas are clipped from the raster-format data. The clipped page data are mapped onto respective model areas corresponding to the page areas on a determined three-dimensional shape model thereby to generate three-dimensional preview data of a print. A three-dimensional preview image of the print is displayed based on the three-dimensional preview data.

The disclosed embodiments provide a printer that facilitates driverless printing. This printer includes a discovery component which is configured to communicate with a client to facilitate selection of the printer by the client. This discovery component is also configured to provide capability information for the printer to the client. The printer also includes a transport component which is configured to receive printer data from the client, and a page-description-language component which is configured to print the printer data received from the client. Note that the capability information provided to the client enables the client to generate the printer data for the selected printer without the need for the client to maintain printer-specific software or printer-specific configuration information for the selected printer.

A method for using a page description language to electronically express colored patches on the border of contract proofs, such that a user can quickly and easily evaluate whether the color of prints produced using a color printer are correct. The verification is performed by visually comparing the test patches added to a print with color patches in publicly available standard color sample swatches.