JPH08263240A - Method for controlling plural printers - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE: To improve the efficiency of print output by providing a means for recognizing how many slave printers are connected with a master printer and printing the volume, that cannot be processed with the master printer, by allocating it to plural slave printers. CONSTITUTION: When a job to be printed is inputted through a network 9, that job is inputted to a controller 4 of a master printer 1. In this case, the master printer 1 analyzes the contents of this job and graps how many matters are printed out by the printers. At such a time, the master printer 1 grasps the states of slave printers 1' and 1'' and can allocate the sheets to be printed by the respective slave printers 1' and 1'' in optimum conditions. Namely, since the number of output trays at the master printer 1 and the slave printers 1' and 1'' and printing processing speed are grasped, it can be optimized the printer to perform printing processing and the number of sheets to be printed. Thus, the image can be extended at high speed.

Description

Detailed Description of the Invention

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to a method for controlling a plurality of printers, and more particularly to a method for controlling a print command efficiently input by cooperating with a plurality of printers of the same type. .

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art Conventional printers have various functions that can be processed by a single printer, but recent changes in the environment surrounding printers have made remarkable changes, and the functions required for printers have become more complex. And it is becoming more diverse.

For example, print commands and jobs that require several tens of prints have become common, and the number of pages has increased to 10 or more. In the case of printing such a large number of copies, in the conventional printer, the first page is printed by the required number of prints first, the second page is printed by the required number of prints, then the third page, and so on. I was printing. In conventional printers, as described above, in order to solve the problem of printing dozens of printed materials in multiple copies, a sorter consisting of multiple output trays is installed, and the printed materials are printed in page order. Some of them were arranged side by side. However, when the number of prints exceeds the number of sorters, it is the current situation that those devices cannot be used well. For that purpose, in units of the number of sorters,
It was necessary to print several times, or print more than the number of sorters had to be manually rearranged in page order.

On the other hand, recent print contents have become very sophisticated, and a great deal of time is being spent on processing for print output. In particular, in advanced print processing, the print content is written in a code called a page description language, and it is common for the computer inside the printer to interpret the language, develop it as a raster image suitable for printer output, and output it. It has become.

[0005]

A problem with printing in the form of a multi-page, multi-copy printed matter is that the post-processing of printing is extremely troublesome. As a means to solve this point, there is a printer provided with a sorter, but there is a mechanical limitation in providing the sorter, and the number of sorter trays cannot be increased indefinitely. Was difficult to meet.

It is an object of the present invention to provide a printer control method for efficiently processing printing in the form of a multi-page, multi-copy printed matter. Another object of the present invention is to improve the effective processing speed of printing.
As a recent tendency, the page description language has become extremely complicated, and it takes a lot of time to develop its raster image. The time taken to develop this raster image is becoming a bottleneck in the time occupied during printing, and the effective printing speed does not increase no matter how high the mechanical printing speed of the printer is increased. The problem of the present invention is to solve such drawbacks of the prior art.

[0007]

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION It is an object of the present invention to provide, in a plurality of printer systems, one main printer, one or a plurality of slave printers, and a high-speed data bus connecting these printers. This is achieved by providing a means for recognizing how many secondary printers are connected, and allocating and printing to a plurality of printers the number of print copies that cannot be processed by one primary printer.

[0008]

According to the present invention, since the printer group is configured as described above, even if a print command has a print number exceeding the capability of one printer, it can be shared by a plurality of printers.
Since it is not necessary to process the same job several times or to process a part of the job manually, the print output efficiency can be improved. Further, since the page description language, which is the biggest bottleneck in a print job, and its raster image processing can be shared by a plurality of printers, image development can be performed at high speed.

[0009]

DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS The present invention will be described in detail below with reference to the drawings. FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating an embodiment of the present invention. Reference numeral 1 is a main printer, 1 ', 1 "is a sub printer, 3, 3'is a high-speed data bus, 4 is a printer controller attached to the main printer 1, and 4', 4" is attached to the sub printers 1 ', 1 ". It is a printer controller.

Primary printer 1 and secondary printers 1 ', 1 "
Are a plurality of paper feed trays 51, 52, 51 ', 5 respectively.
Has 2 ', 51 ", 52". The main printer 1 and the sub printers 1 ', 1 "have sorters 6, 6', 6" each having a plurality of output trays.
The main printer is connected to the network 9 by the cable 8.
It is connected to the.

Next, the operation of this printer array will be described.
In the group of printers thus connected, that is, the printer array, the main printer 1 takes charge of the overall control, and the subordinate printers 1'and 1 "play an auxiliary role of the main printer. At this point, the master printer knows the following: -Number of connected slave printers, and therefore the total number of printers-Number of printers that are powered on and ready to print if they receive data -Print output speed of primary and secondary printers-Number of output tray stages that can be used by primary and secondary printers-Processing capacity of printer controller of secondary printers Jobs to be printed are input through network 9. And the job is the controller 4 of the main printer 1.
Is input to Here, the main printer 1 analyzes the content of the job and grasps how many copies of the printed matter output by the printer should be printed. At this time, as described above, the main printer can grasp the status of the slave printers, so that the number of copies to be printed by each slave printer can be allocated in an optimum state. That is, there is a method of printing as many copies as there are output trays of each slave printer in the order in which they are connected, but it is also possible to know the number of output trays of the master and slave printers and the print processing speed. Therefore, it is possible to optimize which printer should print what number of copies.

The controller of the main printer interprets the contents of the subsequently input job. In most cases, the print content is written in a page description language. The controller interprets the page description language, which font to use, what size font to print, what the line spacing should be, where to put graphics and graphic processing, what kind of content, etc. It develops into a raster image so that it can be printed according to such detailed contents. When all the print contents are rasterized in this way, the rasterized image data is transferred to each slave printer by the high-speed bus data. That is, the main printer and the sub printers (group) share the same print data.

After that, the primary and secondary printers print the number of copies given to themselves by the data given to them,
Can be output to the sorter. In the printer array configured as described above, the main printer can also share the interpretation of the page description language and its raster image processing depending on the performance of the connected sub printer. As in the case of allocating the number of copies to be printed in the optimum state, which printer should be in charge of raster image development of which part of the print processing because the print processing speed of the printer control of the primary and secondary printers is known. Can be optimized.

To do so, the following process is typically performed. The context of the input job is analyzed by the printer controller of the main printer. Then, the context of the page description language, which is the bottleneck in the printing process, is analyzed. At this point, it is not necessary to actually develop the raster image, and it suffices to evaluate how long the actual image development takes.
This evaluation is mainly important for a drawing command that takes time, and if the drawing command can be evaluated, the approximate drawing time of a specific page of a document written in a page description language can be calculated.

Next, the image development processing of each page is allocated to the main and slave printers according to the required development time. In this allocation, not only the processing time in each printer is made uniform, but also the processing capacity of the printer, the order of pages to be printed, etc. are taken into consideration.

The data allocated to each printer and rasterized in page units are transferred to the main and slave printers through the high-speed data bus, and printing is performed using the data.

[0017]

According to the present invention, the entire job is processed by one main printer, one or more slave printers, and a plurality of printer systems connected by a high-speed data bus connecting these printers. Since this is done, it is possible to work efficiently even for printing a large number of copies.
Further, since a plurality of printer controllers can share the image development even for a complicated page description language, high speed printing can be performed.

[Brief description of drawings]

FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram showing an embodiment of a control system for a plurality of printers according to the present invention.

[Explanation of symbols]

1 is a main printer, 1 ', 1 "is a secondary printer, 3'is a high-speed data bus, 4', 4 ', 4" is a printer controller, 51, 52, 51', 52 ', 51 ", 52" are Paper tray, 6, 6 ', 6 "sorter, 8 cable, 9
Is a network.

Claims (5)

[Claims] 1. A plurality of printer systems in which one main printer and one or a plurality of slave printers and a high-speed data bus connecting the printers are connected to each other, and how many slave printers are connected to the main printer. A method for controlling a plurality of printers, characterized in that a plurality of printers are provided with a means for recognizing whether a plurality of printers are capable of processing, and printing is performed by allocating a print quantity having a capacity that cannot be processed by one main printer. 2. The plurality of printers according to claim 1, wherein the main printer has means for recognizing how many trays of trays are connected to the connected slave printers. Control method. 3. The main printer according to claim 1, wherein among the connected secondary printers, it is possible to know which printer is in a printable state by actually receiving the data. Control method for multiple printers. 4. A method for controlling a plurality of printers according to claim 1, wherein a print control command input to the printer is shared by the subordinate printers and processed. 5. The method of controlling a plurality of printers according to claim 4, wherein the main printer has means for recognizing the processing capability of the controller of the slave printer connected thereto.