Printing – Processes – Condition responsive
Reexamination Certificate
2002-11-07
2004-02-03
Hirshfeld, Andrew H. (Department: 2854)
Printing
Processes
Condition responsive
C101S486000, C400S061000, C400S062000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06684789
ABSTRACT:
The present invention relates to a method and system for the transformation of digital print data streams and corresponding printer and printer server.
Virtually all the output devices which are common nowadays use “page description languages”, also called PDL, to produce printed documents. Here, an application program controls a driver for the output device (for example a printer driver). This driver converts information about the graphic objects to be output—for example text or image information—into the respective PDL suitable for the printer used, so that the latter can hereby be controlled directly.
More recent output devices, such as laser printers or digital color printers for example, also offer the possibility of buffering the data streams coming in to control them and, for example, using them as an original form for further incoming print data. This makes it possible to dispense with forms needed for the respective printing, such as letter paper, invoice forms or the like for example, in the individual case. Instead, the application software respectively used merely calls up the form stored once in the printer and combines it with the current print data. In this way, the accumulation of data, for example in networks, can be reduced considerably. However, the result is also organizational advantages: since the forms used no longer have to be kept in reserve by each individual user on his computer, in this way standardized use forms can be achieved, which firstly helps to ensure the often desired standard appearance of a company or an institution and secondly also makes it easier to use current form versions.
However, these aforementioned advantages are normally not used, since the printers used in a company or an institution—with regard to their control—are often not uniform and therefore the use of the functions described above is too complicated, since the appropriate forms either have to be available for each printer model used, which would be very labor-intensive, or only specific printers can be used for specific applications, which is very inflexible.
One possibility of solving this problem is to circumvent the abovedescribed inhomogeneity of the output devices used by employing methods for the conversion of various data stream formats for controlling output devices, which makes it possible for all the computers which produce print data streams to be output to use a standard format for this purpose, by each printer being assigned an interface—be it a dedicated device, be it merely in the form of a software filter—which makes use of such a method and, on the side of the input data stream, uses the format to be used uniformly and, on the side of the output data stream, uses the specific format of the printer to be controlled.
Such a solution is described, for example, by EP 0 109 615 B1, which refers to a method for the conversion of text which is represented in the form of digital data. However, the method taught by this document has considerable disadvantages with regard to the possibilities of current systems from information technology: for example, the method is suitable only for those input print data streams which, in their syntax, follow a format description language whose syntax may be described with the aid of “regular expressions”. This is because the method taught in EP 0 109 615 B1 makes use of a status machine, implemented by means of “key status variables”, for the recognition and conversion of input control objects recognized in the input print data stream into output control objects. These output control objects are in this case produced directly from the input control objects—specifically in accordance with a fixed assignment—as a function of the respective state representing the key status variables. Such a procedure corresponds to the functioning of the theoretical model of the Moore or Mealy machines, which operate quite efficiently but permit only, the recognition of regular expressions. For these circumstances surrounding information technology at the priority date of EP 0 109 615, such a simple possible transformation may have been sufficient, since—as can already be gathered from claim 1 there—only text had to be converted, apart from format information.
For the current circumstances of PDLs or else other input formats to be recognized where possible, such as HTML or XML, this no longer applies in any way, however. In the meantime, these have been built up in such a complex way with regard to their possibilities that a status machine is no longer in any way adequate for their recognition and conversion.
However, the target format, into which the print data stream is to be transformed, nowadays places high requirements on a transformation: although in principle there would be the possibility here likewise of using the smallest common multiple of the functions of current printing format and in this way of reducing the effort on transformation, this convenience in the design of the transformation process would be brought at great expense in the operation of the method, since in this way the accumulation of data in networks would be increased again, since powerful printer control possibilities which as a rule become more and more specific with regard to the printer type used as the complexity increases, would necessarily have to be dispensed with. Such an increased accumulation of data would, however, again stand in the way of the objective of reducing the data traffic in the network by using PDLs. Thus, at the same time, there is a requirement on the transformation process that the latter produces the preconditions that the target formats can be produced in the most flexible manner possible with all their available printing functions, in order that the traffic on the data transmission lines can thus be minimized.
Furthermore, it is necessary to state that printing systems, even today, still only fulfill a single purpose: namely printing. All the manufacturers of laser printers and digital copying systems have made great efforts in recent years to match the processor powers, storage capacities and additional options (such as memory cards, hard drives, network cards) of these systems to the increasing requirements. However, the manner in which printers and copiers are controlled and programmed has not changed significantly in the last ten years.
Printing systems are still controlled by a page description language (PDL) such as PCL, Postscript or Prescribe. It permits a document and its components to be described adequately. However, the many additional options of modern printing and copying systems available in the meantime cannot be used. The consequence of this is that, even today, the entire printing process is controlled and monitored by a host computer. Its task substantially comprises converting the respective information exactly into the page description language “understood” by the printing system.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to specify a method for the transformation of digital print data streams which is both capable of recognizing more complex page description languages, whose syntax may no longer be described with the aid of simple regular expressions, and also provides the preconditions that the recognized graphic objects can be transformed into a target format, but also processed further, as flexibly and effectively as possible, that is to say with regard to their description at the highest possible level of abstraction.
According to the invention, this object is achieved by a method for the transformation of digital print data streams, in which an input print data stream is read in, this is analyzed by means of a parser for graphically representable objects and is split up into these graphically representable objects, and the graphically representable objects are stored in a memory in an object-oriented format, and the graphically representable objects stored in the memory in an object-oriented format are transformed into a format for the control of an output device, preferably a printer, and the objects t
CCP Systems AG
Chau Minh
Hirshfeld Andrew H.
Squire Sanders & Dempsey L.L.P.
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