| 主权项 |
1. A parallel Raster Image Processor system comprising:
a plurality of Raster Image Processors (RIPs) for parallel processing of a plurality of print jobs into a printer-ready format for printing of the print jobs, wherein at least one print job comprises objects described in a Turing Complete page description language in which programming instructions are interpreted so as to indicate page boundaries of the print job, and wherein at least one of the objects includes a description, in the Turing complete page description language of a font, placement size and font information for one or more characters, a group of one or more graphical commands, or pixel data defining an image in the print job; and a splitter for combining the plurality of print jobs in a print queue into a single print job and splitting the print job, which is comprised of the combined plurality of print jobs, into a plurality of chunks and sending the chunks of the print job to the plurality of the RIPs for processing, wherein the splitter is configured to:
interpret the descriptions, in the Turing complete page description language, in the print job enough to determine the objects required by each of the plurality of the RIPs to process each corresponding chunk sent to that RIP;store the determined objects to maintain knowledge of the determined objects, the knowledge comprising information about which determined objects were sent to which designated RIP for processing the corresponding chunk; andsend each chunk to the designated RIP for processing and send the determined objects required to process the corresponding chunk to the designated RIP for processing the corresponding chunk, if the same determined objects are not already with the designated RIP, wherein the splitter is configured to interpret the print job without relying on comments conforming to Document Structuring Convention (DSC). |
