JP2008269157A - Print processor, print processing method and program - Google Patents

Abstract

<P>PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To reduce the conventional burden placed on a user (selection of a print method and determination for the necessity of optimization processing of an electronic document) in an application which can perform both print by a printer driver and direct print by automatically determining which of the print methods is more suitable depending on print data, and automatically optimizing the print data according to the selected print method. <P>SOLUTION: The print processor having a plurality of print methods (e.g., printer driver and direct print) comprises an electronic document analysis means which analyzes an electronic document, a print method determination means which determines a print method using the analysis result, and an electronic document processing means which optimizes the electronic document according to the selected print method. <P>COPYRIGHT: (C)2009,JPO&INPIT

Description

  The present invention provides a print capable of executing both a method of transmitting an electronic document described in an intermediate language after being converted to print data and then transmitting to the printing apparatus, and a method of transmitting without converting to print data. The present invention relates to selection of a printing method in a processing apparatus.

  Conventionally, as a known technique of an electronic document itself, there is a portable document format (PDF) of Adobe Systems, but its data format is URL (http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/DOCS). / Pdf spec.pdf).

  A font can be embedded in such an electronic document. As a result, a font that is not installed on another computer that displays the electronic document is embedded as a mechanism for obtaining the same display / printing result as the electronic document creation environment (environment in which the font is installed). It is possible.

  In addition, when a font is not embedded in the electronic document, a font replacement process for replacing with a built-in font is performed.

  On the other hand, an information processing apparatus (hereinafter referred to as a PC) such as a personal computer can send and print an electronic document directly or to a printer connected via a network. Conventionally, as a technique for printing an electronic document in an intermediate data format represented by PDF, there are printing via a printer driver and direct printing.

  Printing via a printer driver is general printing. The printer driver installed on the PC converts the electronic document into data that the printer can recognize, such as PDL (Page Description Language) data, and then sends it to the printer. And printing.

  In printing by direct printing, an electronic document is directly transmitted to a printer without being converted into PDL data on the PC side. The printer interprets the received electronic document and executes printing.

  In printing by a printer driver, PDL conversion (color space and constellation conversion) is performed via a graphic engine of an OS such as Windows (registered trademark), so that print quality (accuracy) is lower than that of direct printing. For example, when printing an electronic document whose color space is expressed in CMYK, it is once converted into an OS color space (for example, RGB color space in the case of Windows (registered trademark)) by the graphic engine, and again the printer color. It is converted into a space (generally, a CMYK color space). This color space conversion process deteriorates the image quality.

  On the other hand, when printing with a printer driver, even if the font is not embedded in the electronic document and the font is not installed in the printer, the font installed in the PC system is embedded in the PDL. The output can be made in the shape as intended. Also, a function for improving processing efficiency, such as creating a PDL by down-sampling an image according to the resolution of the printer, is provided.

  In printing by direct printing, if a font is not embedded in the electronic document and the font is not installed in the printer, font replacement processing is performed to replace it with another font installed in the printer. Printed. In order to obtain an intended output result, it is necessary to convert it into an electronic document in which fonts are embedded. In this way, in the case of direct printing, in order to obtain the main force as intended and to perform efficient processing, the electronic document itself is processed in advance, such as embedding fonts or down-sampling the image. Need to send to printer.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is available from Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, California. Trademark.
JP 2003-296068 A

  In an application that can perform both printing by a printer driver and direct printing, the user needs to select a printing method from the above two. As described above, direct printing is desirable from the viewpoint of print quality. However, in order to obtain an output result as intended and to process efficiently in direct printing, it is necessary to add a pre-process for processing an electronic document in advance (for example, embedding fonts). In some cases, direct printing may not be performed (for example, when the printer does not support direct printing, or a font that cannot be embedded is included in the document). In such a case, the user needs to select printing by the printer driver.

  Conventionally, it is left to the user to select the printing method and to determine whether the electronic document processing is necessary, and this has been a burden for users who do not have specialized knowledge.

  The present invention has been made in view of the above problems, and has the following configuration. That is, a print processing apparatus having a plurality of printing methods (for example, a printer driver and direct printing), and an electronic document analysis unit that analyzes an electronic document, and a printing method determination that determines a printing method using the analysis result And electronic document processing means for optimizing the electronic document in accordance with the selected printing method.

  According to the present invention, in a print processing apparatus capable of selecting both of a method of converting an electronic document into print data and then transmitting it to the printer, and a method of transmitting the electronic document as it is to the printer, the printing method is automatically selected. It is possible to provide a method for selecting and automatically optimizing an electronic document for a printing method. Thereby, it is possible to reduce the burden on the user.

Example 1
<System configuration example>
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an example of a configuration of a printing system according to the first embodiment of the present invention. In FIG. 1, a client 101 is an information processing apparatus such as a computer having a function as an image processing apparatus. The client 101 is connected to a printer 110 which is an image forming apparatus capable of forming an image and a network 120 such as a telephone line, a LAN, or the Internet. (The PC and printer may be directly connected without going through the network). Here, one PC and one printer are shown, but the present invention can be applied to a system in which a plurality of PCs and / or printers exist.

  In FIG. 1, a client 101 includes an electronic document analysis unit 101-1, an electronic document processing unit 101-2, a printing method determination processing unit 101-3, a printer driver 101-4, a data input / output processing unit 101-5, An image display unit 103-7 to which a display 103-8 is connected is included. Furthermore, an application data file created by an application program such as a document processing application (not shown), a data storage unit 101-6 for storing an intermediate file represented by a PDF used in this embodiment, and the like are included. The data storage unit 101-6 stores system information such as font files held by the operating system of the client 101. A database of these software resources and hardware resources of the client 101 is also stored.

  The electronic document analysis unit 101-1 analyzes an intermediate file document represented by PDF, SVG, and the like, and acquires information such as the presence / absence of an embedded font in the document and the image resolution. In the following description, the electronic document is assumed to be PDF in the present embodiment, but the present invention can also be applied to other intermediate files such as SVG.

  The electronic document processing unit 101-2 processes a PDF file such as embedding a font in the PDF or changing the resolution of an image included in the PDF.

  The printing method determination processing unit 101-3 determines the printing method (printing by the printer driver or direct printing) of the PDF file to be printed, and instructs the electronic document processing processing unit 101-2 to process the PDF as necessary. To do.

  The printer driver 101-4 performs processing for converting the PDF file into PDL by the printer driver.

  The data input / output processing unit 101-5 performs processing for transmitting the PDL file created by the printer driver and the PDF file itself to the printer via the network 120. In FIG. 1, input / output devices such as a keyboard and a pointing device are also connected to the data input / output processing unit 101-5.

<Example of hardware configuration>
FIG. 2 is a hardware configuration diagram illustrating a configuration of an information processing apparatus that can be used as a client. The configuration of the client 101 in FIG. 1 is realized by executing the program stored in the memory 101b by the CPU 101a in the configuration in FIG. A program for realizing the configuration of FIG. 2 is stored in an external memory 101c such as a hard disk. The external memory 101c may use a removable storage medium such as a flexible disk or a CDROM. Further, the data storage unit 101-6 can be realized as a partial area of the external memory 101c. An image is displayed on the display 101-8 and connected to the network 120 or the like via the I / O interface 101d. In addition, the operator performs input as necessary using the keyboard and the pointing device 101e.

  The printer 110 performs printing in accordance with the print instruction received from the client 101. Since the configuration is not particularly limited as long as PDL by printer driver printing, PDF by direct printing, or both can be performed, detailed description thereof is omitted here.

<Outline of processing in this embodiment>
Next, the processing outline of the client 101 will be described using the flowchart shown in FIG.

  The processing of the client 101 is started when the user gives an instruction to print an electronic document.

  First, the printing method determination processing unit determines whether the PDF to be printed is suitable for printing via a printer driver or printing by direct printing (S501). In the first embodiment, whether or not a font is embedded in the PDF is used as a criterion for determination. Detailed description will be given later.

  When direct printing is selected, the process proceeds to S503, and when the printer driver is selected, the process proceeds to S504 (S502).

  When direct printing is selected, the electronic document processing unit 101-2 optimizes the PDF so that direct printing can be performed efficiently. In this embodiment, an optimized PDF is referred to as a PDF in which a font that is not installed in the printer and not embedded in the PDF is embedded (S503). Detailed processing will be described later.

  When the printer driver is selected, the printer driver 101-4 creates a PDL from the PDF document by the printer driver, and the process proceeds to S505. A mechanism for creating a PDL for printing by the printer driver will be described later.

  Next, the data input / output unit transmits PDF or PDL data to the printer, and prompts the printer 110 to execute printing (S505).

  In this embodiment, as described above, whether the font is embedded in the document is used as a determination criterion for the printing method. Therefore, first, a description will be given of a character drawing mechanism in an intermediate data format file represented by PDF or SVG (hereinafter referred to as an intermediate file).

<Character drawing mechanism in intermediate file>
An intermediate file such as PDF includes a drawing command that describes an object constituting a document and an operand that indicates the position, size, and the like of the object. Drawing commands are usually "character system" that outputs characters, "image system" that outputs images such as bitmaps, and "graphic system" that outputs graphics such as lines, circles, and rectangles, depending on the type of object. There are three main types.

  Here, the “character system” drawing command of the Windows (registered trademark) system of MicroSoft will be described. FIG. 3 is a schematic diagram showing information necessary for character drawing. Although FIG. 3 shows an example, generally, the following four font information is required as an operand for a character drawing command.

(1) Character code 301:
This is information for specifying characters. Character codes according to a predetermined code system such as ASCII, Shift JIS, Unicode, etc. are used.

(2) Font attribute 302:
It includes information such as font face names that are suitable for character drawing, italic / bold designation indicating glyph modification, and the number of points that represent character size.

(3) Drawing attribute 303:
It includes information representing the character drawing position, color, clip status, and the like.

(4) Font shape information 304:
It includes information representing a character drawing shape specified by a face name such as Gothic or Mincho. It has drawing shape information (called glyph) for each character. The font information format is broadly divided into bitmap fonts and outline fonts, and various formats such as TrueType and OPENTYPE are defined.

  If all of these pieces of information are not available, the character drawing as intended by the user cannot be established. The character drawing data in the intermediate file normally includes a character drawing command using three font information of a character code, a font attribute, and a drawing attribute. When character drawing is executed on a computer or the like, that is, when an intermediate file is reproduced, an OS (Operating System) that manages the computer is held based on the font face name included in the character drawing command. It is common to draw characters with reference to font shape information of the same font face name.

  However, the specified font shape information does not necessarily exist in all computer environments (also referred to as resources provided by the OS). In other words, the font shape information that existed in the computer environment in which the user created the intermediate file (referred to as an intermediate file creation environment) does not exist in the computer environment in which character drawing is performed (referred to as a character drawing execution environment). There is also a possibility. Conventionally, a font embedding mechanism is known in order to perform character drawing with a font intended by the user even when the font intended by the user who created the application data does not exist in the computer environment where the drawing is performed. The font embedding mechanism will be described below.

  In the character drawing data (intermediate file), in addition to the character drawing command (character code, font attribute, drawing attribute), font shape information is embedded, and the font shape information used in the character drawing data is brought into the character drawing execution environment. Is the method. The font shape information embedded in the character drawing data is registered as a font provided by the environment in the character drawing execution environment, and the character drawing data is drawn using the font. For this reason, font embedding has an advantage that the output intended by the user can be obtained even if the font specified by the character drawing command in the character drawing data does not exist in the drawing execution environment. However, since the font shape information is embedded in the character drawing data, the amount of character drawing data tends to increase. This problem is particularly noticeable when embedding fonts with many character types such as Japanese fonts and Chinese fonts.

  Next, the detailed procedure of the printing method determination process (S501) will be described with reference to the flowchart of FIG.

  First, the printing method determination processing unit 101-3 acquires printer information from a printer that can be used by the client 101 (S501-1). The acquired information includes, for example, a printer-mounted font list that lists fonts mounted on the printer, resolution, and the presence / absence of a direct print function. These pieces of information may be stored in the data storage unit 101-6 in advance, or an available printer may be inquired via the network 120 when performing the printing method determination process.

  If the corresponding printer has a direct print function, the process proceeds to S501-3, and if not, it is determined that the printing process is performed by the printer driver (S501-2).

  Next, the printing method determination processing unit instructs the electronic document analysis unit to analyze the PDF data. The electronic document analysis unit determines whether the PDF can be handled by the device from the PDF version and the command. Further, unembedded fonts in the PDF are listed, and an unembedded embedded font list is created (S501-3). It is possible to enumerate unembedded fonts by examining whether or not the font code information corresponding to the character code of the font being used and the font face name is included in the document.

  In S501-4, if the PDF can be handled on the printer side, the process proceeds to S501-5. Otherwise, it is determined that the printing process is performed by the printer driver.

  Next, the printing method determination processing unit 101 checks whether a font that cannot be embedded exists in the PDF. The non-embeddable font here is generally called a license font, and is a font that must not be embedded in an electronic document such as PDF. Whether or not the font is a license font is indicated in the OS / 2 table in the TrueType font table if the font is a TrueType font, for example. If there is no non-embeddable font, the printing method determination processing unit 101 determines direct printing, and otherwise determines printing by the printer driver (S501-5).

  Next, the detailed procedure of the electronic document optimization process (S503) will be described with reference to the flowchart of FIG. In this embodiment, as described above, embedding an unembedded font in the PDF is optimized. However, in addition to this, processing such as down-sampling the image data included in the PDF according to the resolution of the printer is added. It doesn't matter.

  First, the electronic document processing unit 101-3 acquires the unembedded font list acquired in S501-3 (503-1).

  If an unembedded font does not exist in the PDF, it is not necessary to embed, and the process is terminated. Otherwise, the process proceeds to 503-3 (503-2).

  Next, the electronic document processing unit 101-3 refers to the printer information acquired in S501-1, and acquires a printer-mounted font list (S503-3).

  Next, the non-embedded list is compared with the printer-mounted font list (S503-4). If there is a font not mounted on the printer in the non-embedded font list, the process proceeds to S506-6. Since it is not necessary to embed, the process ends (S506-5).

  Next, the electronic document processing unit 101-3 embeds the font of the unembedded list in the PDF. However, if there is a font that does not exist in the system in the unembedded font list, the font is not embedded (S506-6).

  Next, PDL creation processing S504 for printing by the printer driver 101-4 will be described. In this embodiment, printing by the printer driver may be performed by a general method, and here, a mechanism of printing processing by a general printer driver will be described.

  Printing processing by the printer driver 101-4 is started by issuing a printing instruction from an application (not shown in FIG. 1) that handles an electronic document or the like. The application analyzes application data including character drawing data and calls a graphic engine provided by an OS (basic software), for example. The graphic engine loads the printer driver 101-4 prepared for the type of printer, and passes the output of the application to the printer driver 101-4. Then, the GDI (Graphic Device Interface) function received from the application is converted into a DDI (Device Driver Interface) function, and the DDI function is output to the printer driver 101-4.

  Based on the DDI function received from the graphic engine, the printer driver 101-4 converts it into a control command that can be recognized by the printer, for example, PDL (Page Description Language).

FIG. 2 is a software block diagram of a print processing apparatus according to an embodiment of the present invention. 1 is a diagram illustrating an example of a hardware configuration that can be used as a print processing apparatus according to an embodiment of the present invention. It is a figure which shows an example of the information required for character drawing, and a printing result. FIG. 5 is a flowchart illustrating a series of processes performed by the print processing apparatus according to the embodiment of the present invention. It is a figure which shows the flowchart which shows a series of flows of the printing method determination process in 1st embodiment of this invention. It is a figure which shows the flowchart which shows a series of flows of the font embedding process in embodiment of this invention.

Claims (5)

A printing system in which a printing device and a print processing device are connected to be communicable,
The print processing apparatus includes: a printing unit 1 that converts an electronic document into print data and then transmits the print data to the printing apparatus; a printing unit 2 that transmits the electronic document to the printing apparatus without converting the print data;
Electronic document analysis means for analyzing the electronic document;
A printing method determination unit that determines a printing method from the two printing methods using an analysis result obtained by the electronic document analysis unit;
Electronic document processing means for optimizing the electronic document according to the printing method selected by the printing method determination means;
Printer data creating means for converting the electronic document into print data;
Data transmission means for transmitting the electronic document or the print data to a printing device;
A printing system comprising:   The printing system according to claim 1, wherein the printing method determination unit determines whether or not a graphic shape of a font is included in the electronic document.   When the printing method determination unit selects a printing method to be transmitted to a printing apparatus without converting into printer data, the electronic document processing unit embeds a graphic shape of a font in the electronic document, or in the document 2. The printing system according to claim 1, further comprising electronic document processing instruction means for instructing to adjust the resolution of the included image to the resolution of the printing apparatus, or both. The electronic document processing means includes a font embedding means for embedding a graphic shape of a font in the electronic document,
Image resolution conversion means for matching the resolution of the image contained in the electronic document to the resolution of the printing apparatus;
The printing system according to claim 1, further comprising:   The printing system according to claim 1, wherein the electronic document is a Portable Document Format (PDF).

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