Lexmark International, Inc.

Bruce Alan Peltzer

Shaun Timothy Love

Steven Frank Weed

Gregory John Sherwood

Robert S Samson

Apparatus, system and method is provided in which a primary printer prepares print data for use by its resident print engine, or by an alternate printer. The primary printer includes subsystems for receiving original print data from a device, such as a computer or scanner, and for converting the original print data into a data format compatible with the alternate printer.

Distributed print processing

A rasterizer described in relation to a printer apparatus for defining a page bit map, for a page to be printed, in blocks wherein there are multiple blocks across the width of the page and multiple blocks down the length of the page. A programmed microprocessor executes routines to render objects defined by received or processed drawing orders into blocks of the bit map and also to store drawing orders in display lists, each being associated with a block of the bit map. The blocks are rasterized, including rendering the display lists, on a row by row basis for serialization of the rows of blocks of the bit map to a print engine for printing.

Tiling for bit map image

Page description information received from an interpreter is composed into color plane memories as basic pels for line information and larger, 4 by 2 basic pels for color information, with intensity information for larger color pels also in the color plane memories. A separate color pel memory stores the meaning of the larger pels. Intensity is printed by filling parts of the 4 by 2 color pels as dictated by the intensity information.

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Lexington, KY, United States of America

Bruce Alan Peltzer