LOW MEMORY PRINTER CONTROLLER

摘要

A mechanism is provided that allows color printers to render color or black and white files in a reduced memory configuration, and in a time efficient fashion. An incoming data file which represente a page that is to be printed is provided to an interpreter. The data file includes an object that is to be rendered by the interpreter. The interpreter requests an uncompressed representation of a patch, where the patch intersects with the object that is to be rendered. A patch cache holds a collection of patches of different locations and different types. If the requested patch is not in the patch cache, room is made in the patch cache by compressing the least recently used patch data. The requested patch is then decompressed in the patch cache by a compression mechanism. The compression mechanism holds a collection of compressed patch data that tiles the entire page. Each patch is compressed independently from one another. Thus, the logical page representation is broken down into patches, where the breakdown is known to the interpreter and the compression mechanism. A stitcher uses a stitching process to turn the patch page representation into a compressed line, band, or full page representation. The representation is stored in a frame buffer. Dedicated hardware and/or software decompresses the frame buffer on-the-fly and places colored dots on the printed page.