Kyocera Mita Corporation

Kyocera Technology Development, Inc.

Kyocera Document Solutions Inc.

Kyocera Document Solutions Development America, Inc.

Tomoyuki Tanaka

Arthur Alacar

Barry Sia

Zheila L Ola

Manuel A Manalo

A method for ringtone, voice, and sound notification of printer status, comprising obtaining status information of a printer, converting it into an audible report, and delivering the audible report. The method is especially useful for visually-impaired users and for shared printers in crowded situations where it is difficult for each user to see the panel or monitor display. The methods also include detection by the events controller, UI manager instructing an audio manager, codec decoding an audio file in firmware and hardware organization; job owner identification information embedded into a print job with a unique tag; user identification sound data embedded in a print job; audible report for multiple jobs in a job queue, with positional information; text-to-speech conversion; unique ringtone melody for each user, comprising department prefix, higher pitch modulation for higher priority, and automatically converting an alphanumeric character into the corresponding note.

Ringtone, voice, and sound notification of printer status

A method for providing a simplified menu for a device, by providing a GUI for selecting setting items for display and setting values. Those settings that are different from the standard settings are displayed more prominently, resulting in a display that enables an instantaneous confirmation of the settings. Clicking on tabs to display different menu pages is unnecessary. Those settings that are the same as the standard settings are displayed less conspicuously, such as grayed-out or invisible. Methods include displaying the custom settings as the first tab in the menu, indicating that all the settings are standard, customizing factory-default settings of a printer device, assigning profile names, searching for a profile close to the current settings, differential tree that expands only the branches containing salient settings, associating a setting with another setting, and using a scripting language to specify the setting combinations.

Differential tree and dialog device settings menu

A method for processing a print page, by detecting if the page contains black areas exceeding a user-customizable coverage percentage, and providing a GUI for canceling, printing, and converting the print page. Printing presentation slides, for example, sometimes results in too many unattractive solid black sections, wasting toner or ink. When such a print page is detected, a user is alerted and allowed to convert the black areas, by inversion, dot-meshing, uniformly lightening page, lightening black regions, boundary preservation, and graduated lightening to lighten centers of solid black areas while leaving the contours intact. Methods also include specifying pixel blackness percentage based on grayscale and RGB values, previewing displaying contiguous black areas prominently, second detection step for contiguous areas, and processing PDL print objects by detecting and converting pen and brush colors.

System for detecting and avoiding printing of solid black areas

A system for printing to recycled paper sheets, by scanning a sheet for existing marks, comparing them with the intended output, and printing upon determining the suitability of printing the intended output to the sheet. When recycled paper is used for printing, the intended output is sometimes printed on the wrong side of the sheet, resulting in wasted paper, toner, and other resources. This system avoids printing to the wrong side of sheets, and enables adjustment of intended output for better result. Sheets can be reversed, rotated, and discarded, and the intended output can be adjusted by shrinking, moving, and rotating. Methods also include previewing the output and the existing marks together, low-resolution processing, printing shading patterns on existing marks, rearranging scaled-down pages of N-up printing, Duplex support, collision detection with user-customizable, threshold overlap value and separation distance, and estimating separation distance by boundary-augmentation of alternating 4- and 8-neighbors.

Growing community of inventors

Concord, CA, United States of America

Tomoyuki Tanaka