| 摘要 |
A method and apparatus of more efficiently copying sets of document sheets having a small number of document sheets per set on a copier with a recirculating document handler, onto plural collated copy sheet sets, with plural copying recirculations of all the document sheets in the recirculating document handler by automatically commonly recirculating for copying in the same recirculating document handler a plurality of different small document sets, and automatically separating the plural copy sheets made therefrom into separate collated sub-sets, each copy sub-set corresponding to one of the different small document sets, and wherein the number of the subsets is greater than the plural number of document copying recirculations, the separation being controlled automatically in response to the number of document sheets in the commonly recirculated small document sets. The recirculation of documents in the recirculating document handler may be automatically halted after the initial copying circulation of the original document set, for the loading of a copy set thereof, in response to the counting of a number of original sheets of less than a preset number providing efficient copying. The automatic separating may be provided by a compiler/finisher for the collated copy sheet sets, which normally operates only once per copying circulation of all the documents in the recirculating document handler, but which herein is automatically operated a greater number of times corresponding to the number of the plural small sets being commonly recirculated.
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