The disclosure is directed towards a system and method for using a multicore processor to process a printer definition language (PDL). The system improves efficiency by supporting parallel processing of many commonly used PDLs, while also supporting serial processing of many legacy PDLs. When processing a PDL, the system relies on several stages, including a parsing stage, a printer drawings services stage, and a graphic services stage, which includes order generation. The system provides flexibility by permitting function calls of common PDLs to be either asynchronous requests or blocking synchronous requests. Because legacy PDLs are executed serially, legacy PDL requests are considered to be blocking synchronous requests. The system provides a level of abstraction at the PDL level by allowing multiple requests to be combined into a compound asynchronous request. The system also improves accuracy by notifying the original caller of a request about an error during error handling.

Systems and methods are described that facilitate parallel processing of PDF documents for printing, wherein the PDF documents comprise transparency effects. Transparent objects in the PDF document are identified, and the document is divided into subgroups of pages. The transparency objects are then flattened to enable conversion to PostScript format. The PostScript pages are processed and rendered to raster for printing.

The disclosure is directed towards a system and method for using a multicore processor to process a printer definition language (PDL). The system improves efficiency by supporting parallel processing of many commonly used PDLs, while also supporting serial processing of many legacy PDLs. When processing a PDL, the system relies on several stages, including a parsing stage, a printer drawings services stage, and a graphic services stage, which includes order generation. The system provides flexibility by permitting function calls of common PDLs to be either asynchronous requests or blocking synchronous requests. Because legacy PDLs are executed serially, legacy PDL requests are considered to be blocking synchronous requests. The system provides a level of abstraction at the PDL level by allowing multiple requests to be combined into a compound asynchronous request. The system also improves accuracy by notifying the original caller of a request about an error during error handling.

A print control device includes drawing processing units, a sending unit, and a delivery unit. The drawing processing units perform a drawing process on a print instruction written in a page description language. The sending unit sends the entirety of a print instruction constituted by plural pages, to the drawing processing units. The delivery unit sequentially delivers processing requests each specifying a page to the drawing processing units. Each drawing processing unit performs a drawing process by converting the print instruction for a page specified by a delivered processing request into image data, and again performs, when processing requests are delivered in descending order of page, processing of the sent print instruction from the first page. The delivery unit delivers a processing request to a drawing processing unit to which processing requests are deliverable in ascending order of page.

Image processing apparatus and method capable of performing high-speed printing while suppressing an increase of memory size are provided. The image processing apparatus comprises: a page processing unit to perform processes of a plurality of pages in parallel; a load deciding unit to detect a load level in the page processing unit, for each page; and a controlling unit to control the page processing unit depending on a detection result by the load deciding unit, wherein the page processing unit assigns a thread of an edge extraction process to one or more image data in the page to be processed, and synthesizes an edge of each image data extracted by the thread, and the controlling unit comprises a thread priority order designating unit configured to designate priority order of the thread assigned by the page processing unit, depending on a result of the detection by the load deciding unit.

Methods and apparatus for processing a page description language (“PDL”) data stream are provided. The methods and apparatus divide the PDL data stream to provide a plurality of PDL segments, create associated first and second data files for each of the PDL segments, and assign the first data file or the second data file associated with each of the PDL segments to at least one of a plurality of PDL processors.

A printing apparatus includes a first interpretation unit configured to generate intermediate data of a page by interpreting print data, a second interpretation unit configured to generate intermediate data of another page by interpreting the print data, and a controller configured to perform, according to a specific print setting command indicating that a specific process is to be performed on all pages, control such that the specific process is performed on all the pages. The controller performs the control if the specific print setting command is included in a specific page.

A method of compositing layers by grouping the layers into a foreground group and a background group; identifying independent instructions of compositing model for execution independently from the background group and dependent instructions requiring a compositing output of a background layer in order to composite foreground layers; executing the independent instructions on the foreground layers in parallel with compositing the background layers, a first independent instruction storing a corresponding result in a first buffer and a second independent instruction storing a corresponding result in a second buffer; executing a dependent instruction by updating the second buffer using the background compositing output; and determining a compositing output for the foreground group dependent upon contents of the first buffer and the updated second buffer.

To make it possible to suppress a delay of the start of rendering of a page even in the case where image data is included across the band boundary in the page of print data. The image processing apparatus of the present invention is an image processing apparatus that performs rendering by dividing a page into a first area and a second area based on print data and includes: a memory configured to store image data arranged across the first area and the second area; a first render configured to access the image data and to perform rendering by using pixels within the first area of all pixels of the image data; and a second render configured to access the image data and to perform rendering by using pixels within the second area of all pixels of the image data.

An image processing apparatus includes a first analyzing unit configured to analyze at least a first page data of print data, and a second analyzing unit configured to analyze at least a second page data of the print data. In a case where an error occurs in analyzing the second page data by the second analyzing unit before completing analyzing of the first page data, the second analyzing unit stops analyzing the second page data, and the first analyzing unit continues analyzing the first page data until analyzing of the first page data is completed, wherein the first page data proceeds to the second page data in the print data. The first analyzing unit and the second analyzing unit are implemented by one or more processors or circuitry, or a combination thereof.