Other

International Business Machines Corporation

Lexmark International, Inc.

Carl J Voss

Craig Anthony Rudolph

Christopher R Nash

John Jeffrey Roberts

Steven B Rogers

Mark B Greene

Joel A Jirak

Mark A Bukowski

Cary Patterson Ravitz

Brian Wesley Damon

A method of parsing print stream data including the steps of intercepting a data file from at least a portion of the print stream data, reading at least a portion of the data file and determining if said data file is of a format having subset formats.

Extensible framework for parsing varying formats of print stream data

Heat accumulation in a thermal printhead is controlled by printing blocks of data along the print line in two passes when examination of the data shows the potential of excessive heating. The proportion of heat intensive or black parts in each block is determined by data processor 17 by examining the data for a line in memory 19. An accumulation is made assigning blocks having high heat density minus 2, blocks having intermediate heat density minus 1 and blocks having low heat density plus 1. When that figure is at minus two the next block is not printed until a second pass and the accumulation is set to zero. Where the accumulation is minus 1, print power is reduced for the next block, which is printed in the first pass. Excessive heat in the printhead results in machine damage and impaired print quality. A second pass is completely avoided where the data is such that this is unnecessary. This offers the potential of feeding ribbon only in blocks being printed, although ribbon feeding may be continued to achieve additional cooling.

Two pass thermal printing

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Lexington, KY, United States of America

Carl J Voss