The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Feb. 01, 2000
Filed:
Dec. 22, 1997
Stephen E Carlsen, Issaquah, WA (US);
Lars U Borg, Saratoga, CA (US);
Adobe Systems Incorporated, San Jose, CA (US);
Abstract
Methods and apparatus for blending graphics objects. In one aspect, a method includes receiving a first graphics object; rendering the first graphics object to produce a first pixel map having a first bit depth; increasing a bit depth of a second pixel map associated with a second graphics object that is to be blended with the first graphics object, where the second bit depth is less than the first bit depth; and blending the first and second pixel maps. The method may be implemented to blend graphics objects received by a printing device. In one embodiment, the invention features blending deep pixel data received by a printing device with corresponding shallow halftoned data stored in a shallow frame buffer. The invention may be implemented as a printer configured to receive a page description language description of a page to be printed, the printer including a dehalftone engine for deriving deep pixel data values for objects stored in a shallow frame buffer. In another aspect, the invention features using a pixelmap representative of underlying graphics data for transfer between a host and a remote device by transmitting a halftone representation of the pixelmap from the host to the remote device and reconstructing the pixelmap at the remote device from the halftone representation and a threshold matrix.