Method and apparatus for compacting swath data for printers

摘要

A printing system and method is provided that compacts bitmap print data by determining, per each swath of a page to be printed, the beginning and ending points of each "area" containing pels that will actually be printed within the swath, the locations of the starting and ending slices of each of these areas, and determining "voids" containing a sufficient minimum number of consecutive blank slices within the swath. A void is identified when a number of consecutive blank slices exceeds a predetermined threshold value. The printhead of the printing system will be turned off at the beginning of the void, and then turned back on as it approaches the end of the void, which would correspond to the beginning of the next area to be printed.