Xerox Corporation

George L Eldridge

Farzin Blurfrushan

San A Phong

Munir G Salfity

Peter A Crean

David E Rumph

Barry Glynn Gombert

Frank Michael Goetz

Uoc H Nguyen

Ronald E Rider

William E Nelson

John Cheng Ming Tou

Jon S McElvain

Mark A Smith

Norman W Zeck

Li-Fung Cheung

Sang-Chul Kang

Eric S Barnes

Son Ngoc Nguyen

Otto Sperber

Yuanta Kuo

Tom Henning

Ronald E Weir

Ajit Shah

Bill P Gunther

Hilda Gharabegian

A method and system for providing a portable document services environment on a computer system is disclosed. An installation application may automatically be loaded from a portable device onto a computer system when the portable device is connected to the computer system. The computer system may automatically access a document service application on the portable device based on information contained in the installation application. One or more document service preferences may automatically be received from the portable device onto the computer system, and an electronic document may be selected. One or more document services may be performed for the selected electronic document based on the one or more document service preferences using the document service application.

USB portable document services environment

A automated method, system and computer program for ordering print products by electronic mail. An e-mail request for business cards or other print products, such as postcards or calendars, is generated by a user of an e-mail system and sent to a management system including a management program which, in response, causes the system to selectively retrieve additional information associated with the e-mail request from one or more databases. The management system then prepares the business card order, or other print product order, using the retrieved information. The databases may be internet accessible directory services or other types of databases which the management system can look up using the originating e-mail address contained in the e-mail request in order to retrieve the additional information. The print product order can be prepared by importing the additional information, such as print product, shipping, billing and/or approval information, into one or more templates.

Method and system for ordering print products by electronic mail

A circuit which uses a compressor to divide each separation image into 8-line strips, and to independently compress each strip, a single decompressor to decompress two or more color image separations, strip by strip, by interleaving them, and to apply them to two or more print heads, one for each color separation. DMA from a main memory is used to apply both separations to the decompressor, and the decompressor output is demultiplexed into two print heads, one for each separation. This is done to drive each color separation simultaneously in a single-pass color printer. Multiplexing logic controls the DMA into the decompressor and the output of the decompressor into separate buffers for each color separation. Additional logic uses the page and line sync from each print head to synchronize the accessing of the correct image raster from buffers at the output of the decompressor to the associated print head.

Time multiplexed image data decompression circuit

An embodiment of the invention generally relates to a method for providing printing services. A database is configured to store data related to a plurality of print engines. The data includes static and time-varying characteristics for each of the print engines of the plurality of print engines. A first print engine is selected from the plurality of print engines. A print job is initiated for the first print engine. The print job is processed at a remote printing service based on data related to the first print engine to create a first print engine print file. The first print engine file is provided to the first print engine.

Method and system for maintaining device specific image corrections for printers utilizing remote raster image processing

A network printing system is provided having a plurality of network printers, a plurality of computer terminals, and at least one processor in operative communication with the plurality of printers and the plurality of computer terminals. The at least one processor executes application software for receiving a print data request having a print job from at least one of the plurality of computer terminals. The at least one processor includes an automated selection service module for analyzing printer-related data corresponding to each of the plurality of printers, selecting at least one of the plurality of printers in accordance with the analysis and transmitting the print data request to the at least one selected destination printer. The at least one processor further includes a printer notification module for generating and transmitting a notification message to a user specifying the at least one selected destination printer.

Network printing system having automated selection of a destination printer

There is disclosed in embodiments methods relating to the compression of printing hints. The method in embodiments generates a first set of image pixels having corresponding printing hints. The printing hints are then adjusted to produce a second set of image pixels processed in such a way that an end printed result is visually equivalent to a printed result using the first set of image pixels thereby reducing the entropy in the printing hints. The method improves the compression ratio of an image using printing hints by adjusting the printing hints of pixels that are zero or fully saturated. The printing hints are adjusted in such a way to reduce the complexity of the printing hints.

Method for compressing printing hint data sent to a printer

A compressor can compress an image by reducing the amount of data while preserving the information. Some compressors use run length coding wherein image data is converted into a series of run length code words. The efficiency of run length coding can be increased with the introduction of differential run length code words. The differential run length code words can augment the original set of run length codes. Differential run length codes vary from current run length codes by encoding runs of differences.

Image compression and decompression using adaptive run length encoding

Shifting a page image while it is still in compressed form. The page image is compressed into independent strips that are a full page in the fast scan direction, and a small number of scanlines in the slow scan direction. Then, to shift the page image, whole strips can be deleted in one margin and/or deleted from the other. If the number of scanlines per strip is small enough, the difference in a margin created by the change of one strip will not be apparent. This invention can be used to advantage when it is decided at print time that the output shall be in the form of a saddle-stitched booklet requiring two-up printing, folding and subsequent trimming of the outside edges to uniform alignment. Here, a progressive page shift can be introduced at the printer controller while the images are still compressed, instead of requiring the change to be done to the PostScript Master, which would require reRIPing or decompression, shift and recompression.

Progressive image shift for a saddle-stitched document

A method and apparatus for compressing and decompressing electronic documents, with maximum intradocument independence, and maximum flexibility in optimization of compression modes. The method includes receiving documents containing unknown combinations of a plural data types, including combinations of scanned data, computer rendered data, compressed data and/or rendering tags; dividing the received image into strips of blocks determining from the image itself, which data types are present in each block; compressing data of each data type present in each block with a compression method optimized for its data type. Scanned data may be further segmented into plural scanned data types, where each data type is compressed in said compressing data step with a compression method optimized for said scanned image data type. If the received data type is compressed data, the process may include the additional functions of determining a compression ratio thereof, and accepting the compressed data for use as, or decompressing and recompressing the data, based on acceptability of said compression ration determination. An instruction set is generated that allows detailed decompression instruction data and image data to be combined with transmitted compressed data. A data structure is shown, which segregates data types and instruction data, and allows for block to block and strip to strip processing independence.

Method for compressing digital documents with control of image quality and compression rate

A run length codeword system which has a set of codewords, each codeword being one byte. The first codeword of a run is divided into a 4-bit code part and 4 bits of printing hints. The code part specifies the source of the data, and the format of the remaining bytes in the run. The remaining one or two codewords specify the number of remaining data bytes in the run, or color values.

Set of run-length codewords containing pointers to data sources

Set of run-length codewords containing printing hints

A method of improving the compression ratio of image data in the form of foreground data printed over background data by arranging both kinds of data pixels into 8 by 8 pixel blocks. All blocks that do not contain at least one pixel to be printed are deleted before compression. The deleted blocks will be entirely background pixels that will be overlaid by foreground pixels, or entirely foreground pixels that will not be printed because they are located outside of foreground masks.

Segmenting image data into blocks and deleting some prior to compression

A high speed image data interface between a print server containing a page description language decomposer and an interface card, and a printer containing a rendering card and a print engine, where the interface card is physically located in the printer case and is plugged into the backplane of the printer. The interface is synchronous and carries clock, page request, line request and reset signals from the renderer, and line valid, error and data signals from the interface card. Other communications between the printer and server are carried by a telephone line or local area network. The advantage of this arrangement is that the printer manufacturer can design the printer without having to design the interface card to match the server manufacturer's requirements.

Growing community of inventors

Long Beach, CA, United States of America

George L Eldridge