JPH11110151A - Printer driver, computer having printer driver, and computer system - Google Patents

Abstract

(57) [Summary] [PROBLEMS] To efficiently develop a printer driver corresponding to a plurality of OSs. SOLUTION: A printer driver 100 has a command conversion unit 3A, 3B depending on a corresponding OS, and a renderer 9 independent of an OS. Each command converter 3A, 3
B is the display device interface 1 of the corresponding OS
The drawing commands from A and 1B are converted into drawing commands in an OS-independent format. The OS-independent renderer 9 creates a print command in a format that can be interpreted by the target printer based on the OS-independent rendering command. Renderer 9
Can create both vector graphic print commands that can be interpreted by a page printer and raster graphic print commands that can be interpreted by a serial printer such as an inkjet printer.

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to a printer driver in a computer system.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art In a computer system, a printer is generally connected to a host computer, and a program for causing the host computer to function as a printer driver for driving the printer is installed in the host computer. be called.

[0003] Printer drivers are usually part of the operating system (OS) of the host computer. When printing is performed, the application converts the document data to be printed into a display driver interface module in the OS (for example, GDI of Microsoft Windows).
The display driver interface module converts the document data into a drawing command conforming to a prescribed device driver interface, and transfers the drawing command to the printer driver. The printer driver converts the drawing command into a print command in a predetermined format that can be interpreted by the printer.

[0004]

The device driver interface of the display device interface module of the OS usually differs depending on the OS. Therefore, a printer maker needs to prepare a different program for each supported OS as a printer driver for the same printer. Further, the format of data that can be interpreted by the printer often differs depending on the printer model. In particular, even in the case of products of the same maker, at present, data formats that can be interpreted are different between a page printer and a serial printer such as an ink jet printer.
Therefore, it is necessary to design a different printer driver for each type of printer. These circumstances make printer driver development inefficient.

Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to make it possible to more efficiently develop printer drivers corresponding to a plurality of OSs.

Another object of the present invention is to enable more efficient development of printer drivers for different types of printers.

[0007]

A printer driver according to the present invention includes an OS-dependent unit for processing contents dependent on an OS corresponding to a computer and an OS-independent unit for processing contents independent of the OS. Have. In the development of this printer driver, since only one OS-independent part needs to be developed regardless of the number of types of OS, the development efficiency is correspondingly high.

[0008] Preferably, the OS independent part includes a renderer which is a module for creating a print command for the printer. Since the renderer is the core of the printer driver, the development man-hour is enormous. By making this independent of the OS, the development efficiency of the driver is greatly increased.

The OS-dependent unit may include a command conversion unit for converting a drawing command from the corresponding OS into OS-independent data. As a result, the subsequent processing modules can be made OS-independent.

[0010] The OS independent part may also include a job control engine for controlling the renderer or the target printer. As the ratio of the OS-independent portion in the entire driver increases in this way, the development efficiency of the driver improves. In particular, when the job control engine is a complicated one that controls a renderer or a target printer according to the contents of the drawing command, the OS-dependent drawing command is transmitted to the OS.
The effect of improving the development efficiency by converting the job control engine into the OS independent format by converting the job control engine to the independent format is large.

By providing a driver with a plurality of renderers for generating a plurality of types of print commands, it becomes possible to support a plurality of types of printers or to use the same type of printer flexibly. For example, the preferred embodiment has a renderer that creates a print command in vector graphic data format, a renderer that creates a print command in intermediate code format, and a renderer that creates a print command in raster graphic data format. It can support both page printers and serial printers, and can be used flexibly for page printers. In the case of a printer driver having a plurality of renderers, development of the plurality of renderers is difficult, and the effect of making them independent of the OS is great.

The present invention also provides a computer equipped with the above-described printer driver, and a computer system including such a printer driver or a computer and a printer.

The printer driver of the present invention is typically entirely incorporated in a computer in the form of a computer program. The program is provided to the computer by various means such as a disk storage, a semiconductor memory, and a communication line. Through the following types of media.

[0014]

FIG. 1 shows the configuration of a printer driver according to an embodiment of the present invention.

The printer driver 100 is an OS shown in FIG.
It corresponds to two types of OSs (for example, Microsoft Windows95 and WindowsNT) indicated by OS # 2 and OS # 2. The printer driver 100 has a part for processing contents dependent on each OS and a part for processing contents not dependent on the OS. The part is only a small part, and the modules that require a lot of development are included in the OS-independent part.

The OS-dependent portions are two command converters 3A and 3B that receive drawing commands from the display device interface module 1A of OS # 1 and the display device interface module 1B of OS # 2. These two command conversion units 3A and 3B respectively
OS # 1 display device interface module 1A
And the drawing command in the unique format output by the display device interface module 1B of OS # 2, respectively.
This is converted into a drawing command in a common format independent of S. That is, the command conversion units 3A and 3B convert device driver interfaces that differ for each OS into OS-independent common interfaces. In the printer driver 100, two command conversion units 3A, 3A
Either one of B is selectively used.

The specific form of the common interface is as follows:
The designer of the driver 100 can decide freely.
For example, either the device driver interface of OS # 1 or OS # 2 may be used as a common interface as it is, or an entirely new third interface may be defined and used as a common interface. Also, as an intermediate method, the device driver interfaces of OS # 1 and OS # 2 are compared, and for a part that is common or similar between the two and is difficult to compare, the one of one OS is compared with that of one OS. Extract the parts as they are, and extract the parts that are more expressive than the other OS or have a finer form of expression than the other, and extract those parts and collect them and define them as a common interface. You may. This third method is superior in the following two points. First, since the common interface is a collection of the superior parts of the device driver interface of the original OS, it is possible to utilize the expression functions of the device driver interface of the original OS. That is, the unique expression held by the drawing command is not invalidated. Secondly, the command conversion units 3A and 3B are not so complicated because usable command formats of the device driver interface of the original OS are used as much as possible and large modifications are avoided. .

The OS-independent drawing commands output from the command conversion units 3A and 3B are stored in the spool file 5
Is temporarily stored in the printer driver 100 and then processed by a group of OS-independent modules of the printer driver 100. The OS-independent module group includes a job control engine and four types of renderers (renderers A to D) 9A to 9D.

The basic role of the job control engine 7 is as follows.
The OS independent format drawing command is converted to four renderers 9A to 9
D. Renderers 9A-9 based on what information and what criteria
There are some variations as to whether to select D, but the description will be deferred, and the renderers 9A-
9D will be described.

Generally, a renderer in a printer driver is a module that interprets a drawing command from the OS and generates a print command for the printer, and forms a core of the printer driver. Naturally, the development and inspection of renderers require a lot of man-hours. The printer driver 100 according to the present embodiment includes four types of renderers 9A to 9D, all of which are OS-independent, that is, common among OSs. Therefore, regardless of the number of OS types, the renderers 9A to
Since only one 9D needs to be developed, the development of the printer driver 100 is considerably more efficient.

The first renderer 9A generates a print command (color vector command) in a color vector graphic data format supported by the target printer from an OS-independent drawing command. The second renderer 9B generates a print command (color / intermediate command) in a color intermediate code format supported by the target printer from the OS-independent drawing command. Third
The renderer 9C generates a print command (color / raster command) in a color raster graphic data format supported by the target printer from the OS-independent drawing command. The fourth renderer 9D is O
A monochrome print command (monochrome command) supported by the target printer is generated from the S-independent drawing command.

Generally, a page printer has a relatively large capacity memory and a high-performance processor.
It is easy to configure so that the output commands of any of the renderers 9A to 9D can be supported. Therefore, the page printer can be the most typical type of the target printer of the printer driver 100. In this case, the following effects can be expected by properly using the renderers 9A to 9D.
For example, if the processing capacity of the target printer is sufficiently high, the first
If the intermediate coding and rasterizing are all left to the printer using the renderer 9A, the highest throughput may be obtained. On the other hand, if the processing capability of the host computer is considerably high, the highest throughput may be obtained if the driver 100 handles the intermediate encoding using the second renderer 9B. If the target printer performs printing based on a vector drawing command instructing a special expression that cannot be faithfully rasterized (for example, a special overlay calculation between characters, figures, photographs, and the like), the third renderer 9C (It is premised that this special expression is supported.) By performing up to rasterizing on the driver 100 side, printing faithful to the drawing command can be performed.

In general, a serial printer such as an ink jet printer does not have a processor with a high capacity and a large memory, and has a capability of interpreting vector graphic data and intermediate commands due to price competition in the market. It is difficult to have However, since the printer driver 100 has the renderer 9C that generates a raster command that can be interpreted by a serial printer, the serial printer can be included in the target printer. That is, the printer driver 100 can be used for both a page printer and a serial printer.

The printer driver 100 can be used flexibly as described above by having the four types of renderers 9A to 9B. However, the four types of renderers 9A to 9B can be used.
Development takes a lot of effort. Therefore, the fact that the four types of renderers 9A to 9B are OS-independent greatly contributes to the development efficiency.

Renderer 9A by the job control engine 7
9B can be selected by a method taking into account the features of the renderers 9A to 9B described above. For example, if the target printer is a serial printer, the renderer 9C is selected. When the target printer is a page printer, one of the renderers 9A to 9B is selected. In that case,,
If the processing capability of the host computer is below a certain standard, the renderer 9A can be selected. When the user desires strictly faithful image reproduction, the renderer 9C can be selected.

When the target printer has a plurality of types of renderers (hereinafter, referred to as printer renderers to distinguish them from driver renderers 9A to 9D), the job control engine determines which printer renderer to use. 7 can also control. For example, suppose that the target printer is a page printer and has two types of printer renderers that can receive a color / vector command and perform intermediate coding and rasterizing. One of the printer renderers has a low color representation capability but can draw a high-resolution image with a small amount of memory (hereinafter, referred to as a high-resolution printer renderer). The other printer renderer can represent a full color image but consumes a large amount of memory. Therefore, it is not suitable for high-resolution drawing (hereinafter, referred to as a high-quality printer renderer) (in fact, a plurality of types of printer renderers having different properties are known). In such a case, the job control engine 7 analyzes a drawing command from the spool file 5 to identify a drawing element included in each page of the document to be printed, and, for example, to use text or graphics (graphics, ) Draw elements in high resolution with a high resolution printer renderer.
An instruction to use a printer renderer in accordance with the type of drawing element can be given to the renderer 9A so that a drawing element of a natural image such as a photograph is drawn in a rich color expression even if the resolution is slightly lowered with a high quality printer. When creating a color vector command from a drawing command, the renderer 9A can create a color vector command having the above-mentioned instruction and send it to the printer.

When the job control engine 7 performs the process of analyzing the drawing command in this way, the processing content of the job control engine 7 is complicated and depends on the format of the drawing command. However, the printer driver 100 according to the present embodiment
Is also OS-independent, so the development efficiency is high.

Although the preferred embodiment of the present invention has been described above, the present invention can be carried out in other forms other than the above embodiment. For example, three or more OSs can be supported. The modules included in the OS-dependent part and the non-dependent part can be different from those in the above embodiment. The number of renderers of the driver need not be four as in the above embodiment, but may be smaller or larger. It is not always necessary that all of the printer driver is implemented by software, and it is technically possible to implement a part of the printer driver with a dedicated hardware circuit.

[Brief description of the drawings]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing a printer driver according to an embodiment of the present invention.

[Explanation of symbols]

Reference Signs List 100 Printer driver 1A, 1B OS display driver interface module 3A, 3B Command conversion unit 5 Spool file 7 Job control engine 9 Renderer

Claims (13)

[Claims] 1. A printer driver comprising: an OS-dependent unit for processing contents dependent on an OS corresponding to a computer; and an OS-independent unit for processing contents independent of the OS. 2. The printer driver according to claim 1, wherein the OS-independent portion includes a renderer that creates a print command in a format that can be interpreted by the target printer. 3. The printer driver according to claim 1, wherein the OS-dependent unit includes a command conversion unit that receives a drawing command from the corresponding OS and converts the drawing command into OS-independent data. 4. The printer driver according to claim 3, wherein the OS-independent unit includes a renderer that receives the OS-independent format data and creates a print command in a format that can be interpreted by the target printer. 5. The printer driver according to claim 2, wherein the OS-independent section includes a job control engine that controls the renderer or the target printer. 6. The printer driver according to claim 4, wherein the OS-independent unit includes a job control engine that controls the renderer or the target printer based on the data in the OS-independent format. 7. The printer driver according to claim 2, further comprising a plurality of renderers for respectively generating a plurality of types of print commands. 8. A first renderer for creating a print command in a vector graphic data format, a second renderer for creating a print command in an intermediate code format, and a third renderer for creating a print command in a raster graphic data format. 5. The printer driver according to claim 2, further comprising at least two renderers. 9. The data format of the OS-independent format,
4. The printer driver according to claim 3, wherein the format of the drawing command from the corresponding OS at least partially matches. 10. A printer driver for operating a computer as a printer driver having an OS-dependent unit for processing content dependent on an OS corresponding to the computer and an OS-independent unit for processing content independent of the OS. A computer-readable recording medium carrying a computer program. 11. A computer equipped with a printer driver having an OS-dependent unit for processing contents dependent on an OS corresponding to the computer and an OS-independent unit for processing contents not dependent on the OS. 12. A printer driver having an OS-dependent unit for processing contents dependent on a corresponding OS of a computer, an OS-independent unit for processing contents independent of the OS, and a print command from the printer driver. And a computer system comprising the printer. 13. A computer equipped with a printer driver having an OS-dependent unit for processing contents dependent on an OS corresponding to the computer, and an OS-independent unit for processing contents independent of the OS. A computer system comprising: a printer communicable with a computer and receiving a print command from the printer driver.