Seiko Epson Corporation

Sunao Murata

Tetsuya Suzuki

Takeshi Miyashita

Shinji Nozawa

Yukiharu Horiuchi

Katsuhito Kitahara

Toshiyuki Hattori

Kazunori Chihara

Noriyoshi Chiba

Toshiaki Isobe

Michio Maruyama

Hiroyasu Ogata

Michitoshi Ishihara

Masahiro Nakatsuji

Akira Suzuji

Shinji Sumi

Kouji Tanaka

Kazuyuki Onuma

A printing system for one- or two-dimensional barcodes, and a method and program of creating virtual fonts for such barcodes enable the font and output parameters of the font to be easily changed. The printing system for printing one- or two-dimensional barcodes has a host computer and a printer in communication therewith. The host computer has an application program for creating text data containing a one- or two-dimensional barcode and a printer driver for converting the text data to commands and for sending the commands to the printer. The printing system also has a virtual font configuration program for defining a virtual font linking one- or two-dimensional barcode font data of the printer driver with parameter values configuring the corresponding barcodes.

Barcode printing system, and method and program of setting a virtual barcode font

If the printer generates the printing data itself completely, the processor in the printer generates the printing data after performing the predetermined processing based on the status information data by use of the font ROM, etc. The user enables the printing initiation instruction on the status information to be implemented by the switch on the printer (the printing initiation instruction module and the output initiation instruction monitoring module). With the printing initiation instruction, the printer and the host computer perform the two-way communication through the parallel communication I/O interfaces. Through the communication, the status information output module once transmits the status information obtained in the status information acquisition module on the printer to the host computer. When the status information acquisition module on the printer obtains the status information on the host computer, the printing data output module generates the printing file, and then the printing data output module implements the printing job for the printing file. Therefore, it is not necessary to equip the processor and the font ROM with the printer to generate the printing data. The status information can be printed on the simple and low-cost printer.

Medium where status information printing program is recorded, printer, print controller, status information printing method, and status information printing system

A host sends each page of image data to a page printer in band units and the page printer writes the received each band data into a reception buffer in DRAM by DMA and transfers the band data from the reception buffer to an image formation section made up of members. The host gets an available buffer capacity from the printer just before transmitting each band data, and transmits the band data only when the printer can receive the band data. In the printer, a CPU permits transfer DMA to be started after reception data as much as the data amount calculated based on the data reception speed and the transfer rate is stored in the buffer to prevent an underrun error from occurring. If an underrun error occurs, the CPU sets an error flag, and sends the error flag to the host just before the host starts transmitting each band data. When receiving the error flag, the host drops image resolution and resends the page data with the resolution dropped.

Page printer and page print system

A printer driver is provided in a host computer. When a print job occurs, the printer driver automatically selects the format of a plotting command to be output to a printer. As the command format, there are available two kinds of formats: a high-level printer control language format (for example, PDL), and an intermediate code format expressed in an intermediate language. When the latter format is selected, the printer driver converts a plotting command from an application to an intermediate code and then outputs the intermediate code to the printer. The printer converts the intermediate code to another intermediate code specific to the printer by a very simple processing, and then develops the intermediate code to a bit image, thereby enabling high speed printing.

Print system printer driver and printer

A general-purpose system for enabling the user to easily enter characters whose contents are hard to understand at a glance, such as bar codes, by using a general-purpose application program such as a wordprocessor is provided. For this purpose, a printer driver comprising a font file storing a display font and a bar code record font corresponding to the display font and a conversion function of converting display font codes into record font codes is provided. When a bar code is entered in an application program, a legible display font corresponding to the bar code can be used. On the other hand, when the bar code is printed, the printer driver compatible with a given printer converts the display font into a bar code record font and supplies the bar code record font. Thus, a high-accuracy bar code is printed in accordance with the standard.

Recording device and recording method

To convert gray-scale data of each pixel of image data into pulse-width data for each pixel, a RAM is provided. The RAM has nine pixel memory regions corresponding to nine pixels a to i for forming, for example, a 3.times.3 pixel matrix on the output image. In each of the pixel memory regions, there are stored pulse-width data items corresponding to values which are permitted for gray-scale data to have. Pulse-width data items in the pixel memory regions are slightly different from one another among pixel memory regions. Gray-scale data of each pixel of image data and address word composed of gray-scale data of each pixel of image data and coordinates of each pixel in the 3.times.3 matrix is supplied to the RAM. Thus, pulse-width data corresponding to gray-scale data is read from the pixel memory region so that a laser drive pulse having a pulse width corresponding to the read pulse-width data is generated.

Printing system, printer, printer driver and program storage medium

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Nagano, Japan

Sunao Murata