Patent · US Expired

Method and apparatus for printing documents including embedded print objects with an intelligent printing system

US6407821B1 · kind B1 · utility

67Cited by
5References
56Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateSep 8, 1998
Grant dateJun 18, 2002
Priority date
Expiry dateSep 8, 2018

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F3/1288
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

An intelligent printing system is extended to handle print objects such as EPS and PDF print objects without requiring the objects to be reformatted by selectively decomposing the EPS and PDF print objects and placing resource information contained in the objects in a resource database along with the print data. The resource information is not duplicated; only the first appearance of a resource is stored, later duplicates are discarded. Appropriate references are placed in the page description data stream so that the resource information can be retrieved and downloaded to the printer when the data is being processed at the print server. The downloading of a particular resource occurs only once. When the print data is sent to the printer, the downloaded resource information is recombined with the data and the combination is sent to a conventional EPS or PDF rasterizing program which converts the objects to printable data.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.