JPH1191185A - Printing control method - Google Patents

Abstract

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To obtain a printing result which is the same as that obtained when a document is edited even with the use of a printer driver whose resolution differs between the editing of the document and the printing of the document, by calculating the maximum printing width A in printing with one printer driver and the maximum width B in printing with other printer driver, and by, when the printing width B is greater than the printing width A, setting the printing width used by the one printer driver to the width B and then printing. SOLUTION: In the printing method, in the case print data in which printing width is set by a printer driver 3 used for editing is printed by other printer driver 4, the maximum printing width A in printing with the printer driver 3 used for editing and the maximum printing width B required in printing with the other printer driver 4 are obtained, and when the printing width B is greater than the printing width A, the printing width used by the one printer driver 3 is altered to the width B and printing is carried out. It makes it possible to obtain a print result having a layout which is the same as that obtained when the document is edited and obtain the same print output even if the printer driver and printer having different resolution are used.

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to a printing control method capable of performing printing in a predetermined format using a different printer, and more particularly to printing document data created by a different printer driver in the same manner as the format at the time of creation. The present invention relates to a printing control method that can perform the printing.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art Generally, document data created by an electronic device such as a personal computer is created in consideration of a desired layout image in accordance with restrictions on the number of dots and margins of a connected printer. It is controlled by software called a printer driver corresponding to the printer.

For example, in the prior art, when document data is created using a high-resolution printer driver for a laser printer and then printed using a printer driver for an impact printer with a lower resolution, a layout at the time of creation is created. The print was different from the image. The cause of this is that in a low-resolution printer driver, the size in dot units of one line is relatively larger than the printable area so that vertical / horizontal lines do not disappear in order to maintain the quality of characters. Since the width of the printable area becomes shorter than the print width of one line, this causes the low-resolution printer driver to automatically replace characters that cannot fit on one line when changing from a high-resolution printer driver to a low-resolution printer driver. This is to control printing to the next line.

[0004]

The print control method according to the prior art is based on the application software for a word processor in order to perform printing with a desired layout image even when the printer driver is changed from high resolution to low resolution. It is necessary to change the printer driver to a high-resolution printer driver with the document data read, and to modify the layout / character size / margin while displaying the layout image using the changed printer driver. That is, the print control method according to the related art has a problem that, when a printer driver is changed, a correction operation for maintaining a desired layout is complicated.

More specifically, for example, document data created on a work station in which a printer driver for a recent high-resolution (for example, 300 dpi) printer is set,
If a low-resolution (for example, 240 dpi) high-speed line printer connected to a host computer system located at a higher position of the workstation is used for printing, the layout image is different as it is. Therefore, there is a problem that the above-mentioned correction work is required and the work becomes complicated.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION An object of the present invention is to eliminate the above-mentioned disadvantages of the prior art, and to provide a printing control method capable of printing while maintaining a desired layout image even when a printer driver is changed. That is.

[0007]

According to the present invention, there is provided a print control method in a print system for printing print data at a print width designated by an arbitrary printer driver. When printing the set print data with the other printer driver, calculate the maximum print width A when printing with one printer driver and the maximum print width B required when printing with the other printer driver, and print. When the width B is larger than the print width A, the first printer driver sets the print width to the width B to perform printing.
The feature of.

Further, according to the present invention, when the maximum print width B when printing by the other printer driver according to the above feature exceeds the effective print width of paper, the print data set by the other printer driver is compressed and printed. The second
The feature of.

In a third aspect of the present invention, the maximum width printed on the sheet by compressing the print data according to the above feature is made equal to the maximum printing width A set by one of the printer drivers.

[0010]

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS Hereinafter, a printing control method according to an embodiment of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the drawings. FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating an outline of a printing system to which an embodiment of a printing control method according to the present invention is applied.

The printing system shown in FIG. 1 includes a computer 1 for editing and printing a document,
A high-resolution and low-speed printer 5 and a low-resolution and high-speed printer 6 which are connected to a computer 1; and a display 7 which is connected to the computer 1 and displays a screen for data input and the like. It is assumed that an application 2 for editing, a printer driver 3 for high resolution used for the printer 5 and a printer driver 4 for low resolution used for the printer 6 are installed. Note that this printing system includes, in addition to the above functions, other functions such as character editing in a general computer system, but is not directly related to the present embodiment, and will not be described.

In this printing system, in a normal use state, a user inputs and edits a document using an application 2 in which a printer driver 3 is set, and prints a sheet for checking a printing result from a high-resolution printer 5. Output and do. Next, when the document input is completed and a large number of printing operations are performed, the printing system changes the setting of the printer driver of the application 2 to the printer driver 4 and then prints a large amount of data on the high-speed but low-resolution printer 6. Printing shall be performed. The resolution of the printer is set to printer 6 <printer 5.

In this document editing process, the printer driver 3
FIG. 2 shows the result of printing by the printer 5 by using. In this print format, as shown in FIG. 2, a printable area 21 indicated by a broken line on a sheet 20 is specified by setting left and right margins or line / character spacing, and characters "ABC to MN" are printed on the first line. Characters “OP to ST” are printed on the line. In the figure, A indicates the width of the printable area 21. Although not shown, a line feed code indicating a line feed is added to the end of each line.

When a document created in this print format is simply printed by the printer driver 4 as in the prior art, as shown in FIG. 3, the printer driver is changed from a high-resolution printer driver to a low-resolution printer driver. In order to reduce the number of dots and to prevent vertical and horizontal lines from disappearing in order to maintain the quality of the characters, the first line does not include the predetermined characters "ABC to MN", and the line starts with the character "M". The character "N" was also line-breaked by the line break code, and the layout of the document was completely different. That is, when the printer driver is changed from a high-resolution printer driver to a low-resolution printer driver, the number of dots per character is reduced, and the size per dot per dot is larger than the width A of the printable area. Characters that do not fit on the first line (in this case, "N") are printed on the next line.

In this embodiment, to solve this problem, the printer driver 4 performs the following processing. This processing procedure will be described with reference to FIG.

The change of the printer for printing according to an operator's instruction or the like is used as a factor of dpi (dot per dot).
It is determined whether or not the "inch: number of print dots per inch" conversion mode is ON (step 301).

If there is no mode change in step 301, normal printing starts (steps 301 to 307).
I do.

If the mode is changed in step 301, the dpi is changed by the printer driver when the document is created.
Is set (step 302), and the maximum print data in the line direction of the print data, for example, “ABCDEFGHIJKL” is set.
From the character string of MN ", the number of dots a in the print area necessary for printing this character string and the print width A are determined from the number of dots a.

The number of dots b of the printable area in the print information included in the print data at the time of printing by the changed printer driver and the print width B required for printing based on the number of dots b are obtained (step 304). .

A determination is made as to whether the changed printing width B is larger than the effective printing width that can be printed on paper limited by mechanical or other factors of the printer (step 3).
10). It should be noted that the effective print width described in this specification includes a paper width necessary for printing in order to maintain a layout including a margin.

If it is determined in step 310 that the print width B is larger than the effective print width of the paper, the effective print width is determined based on the aforementioned print width dot number ab and print width AB and the effective print width of the paper. Calculate and set the optimum printable compression ratio X (steps 308 to 309), and
The data is compressed and printed using (step 30).
7). The printing width at this time is desirably set to be the same as the width of the printing area (printing width A) received from the application. Further, even if the maximum print width B is not exceeded in order to maintain the original layout including the margins, printing is performed by compressing data using the compression ratio X.

If it is determined in step 310 that printing can be performed on the paper in width B, and if it is determined in step 305 that width A is larger than width B, the printing width is set to B (step 306) and printing is performed. (Step 30)
7). If the width B is smaller than the width A in step 305, that is, if the width B falls within the width A, printing is performed with the setting.

Although the printing result obtained by the process of the printer driver 4 is different from the resolution as shown in FIG. 4, the same layout as the result printed by the printer 5 using the printer driver 3 shown in FIG. 3 can be obtained. it can. That is, according to the present invention, the same print result as in document editing can be obtained even if a printer driver having a different resolution is used between document editing and document printing. For example, when editing a document with a PC printer (300 DPI) and performing large-scale printing with a mainframe printer (240 DPI), there is no need to modify the document layout. Further, even if the maximum print width B is not exceeded in order to maintain the original layout including the margins, the layout is kept as it is by compressing and printing the data using the compression ratio X. be able to.

In the above embodiment, a printing system in which a plurality of printers having different resolutions are connected to one computer has been described. However, the present invention is not limited to this. For example, the printing system may be individually connected to different computers / word processors. The present invention can also be applied to a case where printing is performed using connected printers having different resolutions. The print processing method in this case is such that the printer driver stored in each computer includes the function shown in FIG. 3 and executes the function when reading a document created in another print format. This can be easily achieved by setting. Further, the above processing may be incorporated not only into the printer driver but also into other functions of the personal computer to operate the printer driver.

[0025]

As described above, according to the present invention, when the print data in which the print width is set by one printer driver is printed by the other printer driver, the maximum print width A when the print data is printed by one printer driver. And the maximum print width number B required for printing by the other printer driver is calculated. When the print width B is larger than the print width A, the print width by the other printer driver is set to the width B.
, And the same print result as in document editing can be obtained even if a printer driver having a different resolution is used between document editing and document printing.

According to the present invention, the printing width B of the maximum printing width of one line when printing is performed by the other printer driver
If the data exceeds the effective print width of the paper, the print data set by the other printer driver is compressed and printed, so that the necessary data can be printed on the paper in the format used when editing the document according to the paper size. . Further, according to the present invention, by making the maximum width of one line printed on the paper by the compression the same as the maximum width of the original printer driver, it is possible to obtain the same print result as when editing a document.

[Brief description of the drawings]

FIG. 1 is a diagram showing a functional configuration of a printing system to which an embodiment of a printing control method according to the present invention is applied.

FIG. 2 is a diagram showing a result of printing by a printer using a printer driver.

FIG. 3 is a diagram showing a result of printing a document edited by using a printer driver 3 by a printer 6 by using a printer driver 4;

FIG. 4 is a view showing a result of extending a printable area of a document edited by using a printer driver and printing the document by a printer using the printer driver;

FIG. 5 is a view for explaining an operation flow according to the embodiment;

[Explanation of symbols]

1: computer, 2: application, 3 and 4:
Printer drives, 5 and 6: printer, 7: display, 20: printing paper, 21: printing area.

Claims (3)

[Claims] 1. A print control method in a print system for printing print data at a print width designated by an arbitrary printer driver, wherein when print data of which print width is set by one printer driver is printed by the other printer driver, Calculate the maximum printing width A when printing by one printer driver and the maximum printing width number B required when printing by the other printer driver, and when the printing width B is larger than the printing width A, A printing width set by the printer driver to width B and printing. 2. When the maximum printing width B when printing by the other printer driver exceeds the effective printing width of paper, printing data set by the other printer driver is compressed and printed. Item 6. The printing control method according to Item 1. 3. The print control method according to claim 2, wherein the maximum print width printed on the paper by compressing the print data is made equal to the maximum print width A set by one of the printer drivers.