Facsimile and static presentation processing – Static presentation processing – Data corruption – power interruption – or print prevention
Reexamination Certificate
1999-09-27
2003-05-06
Evans, Arthur G. (Department: 2622)
Facsimile and static presentation processing
Static presentation processing
Data corruption, power interruption, or print prevention
C358S001120
Reexamination Certificate
active
06559961
ABSTRACT:
In the xerographic reproduction and other printing arts, especially where a print job is a large, multi-page document, or a large number of copies of a plural page document, it is well known that frequent paper jams and job recoveries can result in reduced productivity, operator frustration, and having to discard many sheets of print jobs which are only partially completed when the jams occurred. It is also well known in the printing art that certain types of image substrate sheets being printed in a printer are substantially more prone to jams than normal printing sheets such as standard letter or legal size paper of normal weights. Examples of more jam prone sheets include very large sheets, heavy card stock sheets, tabbed sheets, special cover sheets, special coated paper sheets, transparencies, etc.. These more jam prone sheets require far more frequent printer stoppages, jam clearances, and job recoveries. Often, such special, more jam prone, sheets are only a few pages of a document which is otherwise being printed on normal copy sheets, yet the printing of the entire document is interrupted, and several pages of each document copy sheet may have to be cleared out of the print engine, discarded, and reprinted. It is a feature of the disclosed system herein to reduce many of the above-described and other problems.
In the disclosed embodiment, as an electronic print job document comes in to the print server or other electronic input for an electronic printer for printing, the pages of that document specifying more jam prone sheets may be electronically identified and electronically separated or “pulled” from the normal print order print queue. Those special, more jam-prone, sheet page requirements may be identified from the job ticket, PDL, or other special print stock instructions or indicia. Or, in some cases, they may be identified from a paper supply drawer designator (of a drawer in which special paper or card stock is loaded). These automatically electronically pulled jam prone pages are then printed first, separately, out of order, so that they can be better supervised, and so as not to require throwing away other (normal) printed sheets in job recoveries to clear jams. These special sheets are fed into an interposer or other intermediate tray(s) (intermediate the printer output) for subsequent insertion. Thus, if a jam occurs due to a special sheet, only some of these special sheets need to be purged and reprinted, not the entire, or a large proportion of, the multi-page document set or sets. Then, after the jam-prone sheets have been printed and temporarily stored in the interposer, the rest of that same print job, which is less jam prone, is printed. That is, the text pages being printed on standard weight, standard size, paper, are then printed, and then collation is reestablished (to provide complete collated sets of the print job) by interposing (inserting) the previously printed sheets from the interposer tray(s) into the print job stream of the printer at the page positions from which they were electronically removed. Properly collated complete print job documents may thus be normally sent on for output and/or finishing.
Note that this should be distinguished from the prior use of interposers (noted below) to interpose preprinted sheets previously printed separately, on a separate printer or otherwise, which requires special programming instructions for each insert.
By way of background on “interposers” (sheet inserters) for printers there is noted, for example, Xerox Corp. U.S. Pat. No. 5,489,969 issued Feb. 6, 1996 to J. J. Soler, et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 5,946,641, issued Aug. 31, 1999 based on allowed U.S. application Ser. No. 08/876,419 filed Jun. 16, 1997 by J. L. Rourke, et al., originally filed as a provisional application on Oct. 18, 1996 (D/96509). The Canadian equivalent thereof was published on Apr. 18, 1998 as publication number 2215766. Said Rourke, et al. patent is also of interest for disclosing a queuing system examining document attributes and delivering one or more portions of the document to one or more document processing subsystems and then merging the document portions.. Other art is cited in both. Especially as to the latter, the Xerox Disclosure Journal publication, “Integration of Black Only and Color Printers” by Paul F. Morgan, Vol. 16, No. 6, pp. 381-383, November/December, 1991.
Of background interest as to tab printing in a network context, there is noted Xerox Corp. U.S. Pat. No. 5,946,461 to Landry et al.
By way of general background on printer jam detection and job recovery, there is noted, for example, Xerox Corp. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,045,881; 4,231,547; and 5,179,410.
There are numerous background examples of many products and patents on electronic printing, print job queue management, and the like, including those cited above, such as said Rourke, et al., and other patents cited therein. Thus, electronic printing of electronic print jobs in general, as well as jam detection, job recover, collation, finishing and other aspects thereof, is well known in the art from these and many other patents and products. Accordingly, they need not be re-described herein for those skilled in the art.
By way of such background, it is well known that an electronic print job being electronically sent to a printer can automatically control the printer operation, including the selection of the print sheets for particular pages. It may include special sheet selections, along with the other document printing instructions, in one of the known page description languages (PDL), or other print job instructions. The print job may be sent directly or via an interconnecting separate or integral print server. Some commercial electronic printers allow additional such selections or additions to be made from the printer console or graphic user interface (GUI), or a “job ticket”. The electronic print job may be sent directly from user terminals, or from electronic storage, typically over internal or external networks to which the printer is connected, which may also connect with the Internet. Typically the sent print jobs go into a print queue of print jobs in an assigned or selected printing order in the print server, which print order is usually determined by their document receipt order, and document page order, unless overridden is some manner.
Some further examples of prior patents relating to networked printers in network environments of plural remote terminal shared users include Xerox Corporation U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,453,128; 5,170,340; 5,226,112; 5,243,518; 5,287,194; EPO 0529818A3 pub. Mar. 3, 1993; and GB 2198566A pub. Jun. 15, 1988. Some patents on this subject by others include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,623,244; 4,651,278; 4,760,458; 4,821,107; 4,903,229; 4,953,080; 5,113,355; 5,113,494; 5,181,162; 5,220,674; 5,247,670 and 5,371,837. Further by way of background, some of the following Xerox Corporation U.S. patents also include examples of networked systems with printers: U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,153,577; 5,113,517; 5,072,412; 5,065,347; 5,008,853; 4,947,345; 4,939,507; 4,937,036; 4,920,481; 4,914,586; 4,899,136; 4,453,128; 4,063,220; 4,099,024; 3,958,088; 3,920,895; and 3,597,071. Some of these patents also disclose “multifunction” machines, such as digital printer/scanner/facsimile/copier machines, and their controls.
It is also known to provide “job tickets” with page description language (PDL) or other print job instructions. Cited merely as two examples are Xerox Corp. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,467,434 and 5,493,634. Job tickets are printed sheets or cards with optically readable indicia code providing printing control instructions which can be inputted to the scanner of the printer, if it has one, or to a connected scanner.
Some historic network systems related publications include “Xerox Office Systems Technology . . . Xerox 8000 Series Products: Workstations, Services, Ethernet, and Software Development” ©1982, 1984 by Xerox Corporation, OSD-R8203A, Ed. T. Linden and E. Harslem, with a “Table of Contents” citing its numerous prior publications sources, and an Abstrac
Isernia Robert J.
Nearpass Richard E.
Stoll James S.
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