Lexmark International, Inc.

Cuong Manh Hoang

Christopher Lawrence Knapp

Gary Scott Overall

John Parker Richey

Martin Geoffrey Rivers

Mark Stephen Underwood

David John Mickan

Ronald Todd Sellers

Bryan Scott Willett

David Brian Langer

John K Brown, Iii

Allen P Johnson

Brian Wesley Damon

Mark Lane Mayberry

James Howard Ellis

Michael Donald Bender

David William Murphy

Carl P Cole

Stephen R Troyer

Gregory John Sherwood

Warren J Spina

John Neil Wellman

Jeffrey A Minnick

Aaron Charles Yoder

Michael James Klein

Phillip Daniel Erwin

Terry W Ringle

Martin Joseph Brown, Jr

Darrin Lee Duffin

Systems and methods for marking media are provided. The method may include preparing an image for printing on print media, the image including an indication of a first and a second event. The method may further include printing a first portion of the image on the print media, evaluating data and electing to print a second portion of the image wherein the second portion includes the indication of either of the first or second event.

System and method for marking print media

A method of positioning an ink jet printhead in a printer includes dividing a bitmap into a plurality of rows of tiles. A subset of the rows of tiles to be printed in a next pass of the printhead is identified. Printable ones of the tiles in the subset of rows are identified. The printable tiles contain printable data. Within each printable tile, a top most location of the printable data and at least one of a left most location of the printable data and a right most location of the printable data are identified. A print medium is advanced in a feed direction until a portion of the print medium corresponding with the top most location of the printable data of at least one printable tile is substantially aligned with a top nozzle of the printhead. The printhead is moved, in a scan direction, directly to a position on the print medium corresponding to one of the left most location of the printable data of at least one printable tile and the right most location of the printable data of at least one printable tile.

Ink jet swath prediction method

An improved printer is provided that uses a hard disk drive resident in the printer to temporarily store some of the page data of print jobs received by this printer. Since disk access time is relatively slow as compared to access time of random access memory (RAM), only a minimal amount of pages are initially stored on the hard disk drive while the remaining pages of a print job continue to be stored in RAM, such that the pages on the hard disk drive are interleaved with those stored in RAM. Once the pages are stored on the hard disk drive, some of the areas of RAM where they previously resided are released, which allows the printer to free up some of its RAM. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, only every fourth page is initially stored on the hard disk drive, which effectively spreads out the effects of the slower disk access time across several pages as they are printed. The page data that is stored on the hard disk drive will be divided into tiled 'blocks' of print data, so that the individual blocks can be stored in non-contiguous locations within the printer's main memory system of RAM, and later stored on the hard disk drive. If a page of data is to be stored on the hard disk drive, some 'empty' space in RAM large enough to hold all of the blocks of data that are being stored on the hard disk drive for this page is reserved in RAM, so that later the blocks that have been stored on the hard disk drive can be retrieved from that drive and will have an immediate place to go in the printer's RAM, which allows the printer to maintain its overall rated printing speed in more situations. These 'empty' locations that have been reserved in RAM and known as 'shared memory tables,' and will contain enough memory locations in the printer's main RAM system to hold all of the compressed bitmap data for all of the blocks for a particular page, or for the 'largest' page (in terms of compressed bitmap data) of several pages. If the printer's RAM becomes so scarce that, even after all pages of bitmap data are stored on the disk, the printer still calls for more RAM to be freed, then two or more shared memory tables can be combined with one another in an attempt to make more RAM available to meet the printer's request for more free RAM.

Method and apparatus for temporary storage on disk of collated print data

For a multiprocess application including a plurality of work stations at which the application processes proceed simultaneously, such as a printer including serially aligned laser and inkjet print engines, a method of controlling job throughput includes providing a queue for each work station, providing job data to the queues for a plurality of jobs, and consecutively tracking for the jobs the progress of the process corresponding to the rate-determining step for the application for each of the jobs so that as each job is completed at a particular work station the work station begins the process of the work station for the next job.

Method for controlling the passage of media through mixed speed print

A high speed printing system including a host computer, a printer controller and a print engine. The printing system can operate in a normal mode where a high level page description language is used to convey page information from the host computer to the printer controller. The system further permits rasterization of a page to be printed at the host computer and the downloading of rasterized page data to the printer controller in a form that the data can be directly serialized to the print engine.

Image printing solution for a printing device

An improved printer is provided that receives a print job from a host computer and divides the bitmap image of a page to be printed into a series of image blocks or tiles. Each image block containing non-null data will be stored in the printer's memory system, typically placed in a non-contiguous memory location with respect to other blocks. The null image data blocks will not be stored in the printer's memory system, but instead only their locations on the physical printed page will be stored in a 'block list table.' Each entry in the block list table contains the beginning address of the physical RAM area that contains one of the image data blocks, and also contains other variables or attributes concerning the particular image data block, such as whether or not this block is a regular non-null data block, or a 'no-op' (or 'NOP') block containing null data. Null data blocks require no physical memory address to be listed in their entry on the block list table, since no physical RAM areas are needed for storing null bitmap image data. Rather than building a band buffer in contiguous memory before shipping rasterized data to the laser printhead, the present invention builds in a cache a series of rasterized line segments of bitmap data in real time and sends them to the laser printhead 'on the fly,' by retrieving a single rasterized line segment of data, block-by-block, as needed to complete a single entire line.

Method and apparatus for building rasterized lines of bitmap data to be

An electrophotographic printer (1) adjusts high resolution data while preserving the resolution capabilities of the printer. Data in a 600.times.600 bit map is assigned alternately to two rows of a 300.times.1200 bit map. Excellent visual effects are realized.

Bit map adjustment preserving resolution

A printer having a print engine (13) and a bit map memory (12) including a number of page image areas (31) into which information to be printed is rasterized and from which information for the print engine is serialized. A digital processor (11) controlling the print engine is operable to reduce a page image area (31) to a modified page image area (37) based upon the highest and lowest addresses at which information has been written into the page image area. The digital processor (11) is also operable to begin rasterization of a new page image area when a sufficient amount of an existing page image area (41) has been serialized to make available the requisite bit map memory for the new page.

Bit map memory management for a page printer

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Lexington, KY, United States of America

Cuong Manh Hoang