SOFTWARE CONTROLLED BIT-MAP DELIVERY SYSTEM FOR ELECTRONIC REPROGRAPHICS

Publishing Venue

Xerox Disclosure Journal

Abstract

In an electronic reprographic or printing system, a bitmap image is presented to the printing apparatus which subsequently generates a hardcopy output of the bitmap image. The current range of printing and image acquisition technologies frequently results in incompatibility between the bitmap image and the printing apparatus with respect to the format of the digital image. Recognizing the need to allow a bitmap image to be acquired in a most natural manner, for example a raster by raster scan, it was determined to be desirable to implement a simple circuit, under software control, to enable the raster oriented bitmap image to be output in an asynchronous manner to a wide range of printing devices.

XEROX DISCLOSURE JOURNAL

SOFTWARE CONTROLLED BIT- Proposed Classification MAP DELIVERY SYSTEM FOR
ELECTRONIC REPROGRAPHICS
Timothy W. Jacobs
Kenneth D. Romano
Anthony M. Frumusa

US. C1.364/920.7 Int. C1. G06f 1/00

In an electronic reprographic or printing system, a bitmap image is presented to the printing apparatus which subsequently generates a hardcopy output of the bitmap image. The current range of printing and image acquisition technologies frequently results in incompatibility between the bitmap image and the printing apparatus with respect to the format of the digital image. Recognizing the need to allow a bitmap image to be acquired in a most natural manner, for example a raster by raster scan, it was determined to be desirable to implement a simple circuit, under software control, to enable the raster oriented bitmap image to be output in an asynchronous manner to a wide range of printing devices.

The present invention controls the delivery of a bitmap image to a printing device by selecting the image line to be delivered and initiating the transfer of that line to a shift register circuit. Selection of the line to be transferred is based upon an algorithm suitable to place the image into a format suitable for the printing device. Specifically, the hardware implementation employs a dynamic video random access memory (VRAM), a microcontroller such as the Texas Instruments TMS34010, and transfer logic. The VRAM is a standard dynamic RAM with a serial shif...