Facsimile and static presentation processing – Static presentation processing – Emulation or plural modes
Reexamination Certificate
1999-04-26
2003-03-18
Evans, Arthur G. (Department: 2622)
Facsimile and static presentation processing
Static presentation processing
Emulation or plural modes
C358S001180
Reexamination Certificate
active
06535293
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a printing system constituting by a printing apparatus which operates upon receiving print information from a data processing apparatus (host computer), and a print data processing apparatus which is a combination of software modules referred to as printer drivers and device drivers that generate print information at the host computer side for the printing apparatus. The invention relates further to a printing control method, a data processing apparatus, a data processing method and a storage medium therefor.
A printing control method and the flow of processing in a conventional printing system will be described first.
In general, a printing system is constructed by connecting a host computer and a printing apparatus via parallel communication means, such as a Centronics interface, or via network communication means.
At the host computer, application software such as a word processor or spreadsheet runs on a so-called basic operating system such as Windows (the registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation). If printing is performed using the application software, the program implements printing using a graphic subsystem, which is one of several subsystems provided by the basic operating system.
The graphic subsystem, which is called GDI (Graphic Device Interface) in the Windows environment, supervises the processing of image information for a display or printer.
In order to compensate for dependency upon the particular device, such as a display or printer, the GDI dynamically links modules referred to as device drivers and executes output processing in regard to each device. The module for a printer is referred to as a printer driver. With a printer driver it is necessary to prepare a group of functions referred to as a DDI (Device Driver Interface) whose inclusion in the device driver is decided beforehand depending upon the capabilities and functions of the printer driver. In regard to the calling of an API (Application Programming Interface) of application software, the arrangement is such that the GDI performs a data conversion for the device driver, the group of DDI functions of this device driver are called from the GDI as appropriate and the prescribed print processing is executed. The GDI sequentially processes print requests from the application software via the printer driver. The processing of the printer driver can be classified into two types, namely a PDL type and an image type.
The PDL type is suitable for an arrangement in which the printing apparatus is equipped with a controller that is capable of processing a control command referred to as PDL (Printer Description Language). The processing involved is mainly processing for converting the DDI, which is delivered from the system, to a PDL command.
The image type, on the other hand, does not execute highly sophisticated plot processing on the side of the printing apparatus but rather expands print images on the side of the printer driver and sends the images to the printing apparatus so that they may be printed.
In processing for printing text, for example, the PDL-type processing mode performs printing by utilizing fonts incorporated in the printing apparatus or allocates IDs specific to character patterns expanded as necessary on the side of the printer driver in advance, first registers the character patterns on the side of the printing apparatus and then prints the characters based upon print position information and ID.
With the image-type processing mode, the printer driver possesses a plotter memory which stores data in band or full-page units, and characters are expanded in this memory. When one band or a full page of plot processing ends, the content of the plotter memory is transferred to the printing apparatus as image data and the prescribed image is printed out.
The prior art includes an arrangement in which the PDL and image types are utilized exclusively in one printer driver. In general, which should be utilized is decided by the user per se depending upon the content of the document to be printed, and the setting is made using the interface (referred to as a “user interface” below) of the printer driver.
The example of the prior art cited above has a number of problems.
(1) There are instances where it is difficult for the user to decide the optimum processing mode (PDL or image) from the content of a document.
Generally, the PDL processing mode is possible to process plain text data in high speed compared with the image processing mode.
However, the high speed performance of the PDL processing mode is not necessarily secured, because the processing performance depends on the contents of data.
For example, in case of a high resolution image such as a photograph taking up the entire side of a sheet of paper and having characters written thereon (see FIG.
3
), it is highly likely that processing will be executed at higher speed by the image driver. That is, the processing time needed to obtain a printed result, which depends upon the size of the area plotted, whether there is a background beneath the characters and whether the document consists of a plurality of pages (i.e., whether or not there is a hit in the font cache), differs greatly depending upon the type of driver operation.
The image takes up the full side of a sheet of paper in the case of printing as shown in FIG.
3
. Even if text separation processing is performed and the characters are cut from the document separately and processed as PDL in this case, there is an increase in the commands and textual data that are required for processing the characters as PDL. As a result, there is an increase in the overall print data and it is necessary to execute two kinds of processing, namely image plotting and text printing. The result is significant overhead from the standpoint of amount of processing.
In the case of such a full-page image, the superior choice is the image-type printer driver, in which characters also are pasted on the image expanded on the host side and the entirety is sent to the printer as an image.
(2) Allowing the user to select the optimum processing mode leads to ever more complicated user interfaces for the printer driver and is likely to lead to greater confusion for the user. Even in a case where it is attempted to lighten user load in regard to setting different conditions by allowing the setting of these conditions to be represented by icons, as shown in
FIG. 4
, there is still the danger that the user will be confused if a greater number of various printing modes is provided.
(3) A method that has been considered to solve the problems that arise when the selection is made by the user involves storing DDI information temporarily as a file and having the printer driver itself analyze this information to thereby precisely determine the optimum processing mode. However, storing the DDI information temporarily as a file takes time, with the likelihood that performance will decline.
(4) In order to precisely determine the optimum processing mode, it is necessary to ascertain the correlation (extent of overlap) among plot objects. If there is a very large number of plot objects, the processing for detecting them will instead lead to greater overhead and may make the desired result unobtainable.
(5) When the degree of overlap between text and other plot objects is examined, ascertaining pattern overlap in the plotter memory is processing executed in units of pixels. Detection processing in pixel units leads to greater overhead and may make the desired result unobtainable.
For example, in a case where characters ABC, an ellipse having a hatched pattern and a single slanted line have been drawn closely together, as illustrated in
FIG. 5
, it is difficult to precisely ascertain the degree of overlap, if any. In such case, the conventional practice is to discriminate degree of overlap based upon information referred to as a “font boundary box”, which encloses the character string in the manner indicated by the dashed-line box shown in FIG.
5
. In such case, however
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