International Business Machines Corporation

Everett T Eiselen

John R Disbrow

David T Wang

Stephen Gouze Luning

James Garman Belleson

Gerald I Findley

Page modification method in a printer subsystem of the partial page

A raster printer with sufficient flexibility so that text data and image data of any size and orientation can be placed at any position on a page. Input data has a succession of coded character data along with control data which specifies information concerning font selection and the placement of the characters on the page. Control circuits process the input data, one character at a time, and generate for each of the characters, data relating to the position of the character on the page, the size of the character and the address in storage of the graphic pattern for the character. The data is utilized by pattern move control logic to access the graphic pattern in the order the characters are to be printed and move the graphic data to a strip buffer. Data is read out of the strip buffer to energize imaging apparatus to print a page corresponding to the graphic pattern of the character data. An accumulator provides temporary storage for parts of the graphic pattern data and this data is logically ORed with later data so that a page of unlimited complexity can be printed.

Flexible text and image generator for a raster printer

An image can be represented by an M .times. N array I(*,*) of image points, where each point I(i,j) over the ranges 0.ltoreq.i&lt;M and 0.ltoreq.j&lt;N is a value or set of values representing the color and intensity of an elemental portion of the image. A black/white image can be represented by assigning to each point I(i,j) a value of 1 or 0. Thus, I(i,j) = 1 represents a black elemental image area, while I(i,j) = 0 represents a white elemental area. Image manipulation refers to that class of image processing operations which sequentially process the points of a rectangular array I(0,0), I(0,1), . . . ,I(0,n-1), I(1,0), . . . ,I(M-1, N-1) in such a way that the resulting points must be mapped into coordinate points of the array. The image processing operations satisfying this constraint include the blanking of an image area, the combining of two images, the changing of scale of an image by a rotational amount, rotation by 90.degree. , and the creation of a mirror image. Image manipulations in the invention are performed upon black/white images by logically combining a base image stored in an accumulating memory with a sequence from another raster source subject to selective size and translation changes. Such processing is subject to two constraints. First, the data must be in non-compressed form. Second, the processed data must not fall outside the memory space originally occupied by the base image in the memory. Optionally, the function of magnification/minification may be performed separately from the other image manipulations. This can be conveniently done by placing the magni/minifier between the external image source and a network, which network logically combines the serial information from the external source with the serially extracted base image information stored in the accumulating memory.

Apparatus for image manipulation

Growing community of inventors

Los Gatos, CA, United States of America

Everett T Eiselen