Abstract: An electronic printing system prevents printing failures and interruptions associated with the inability of an image generation subsystem to generate a page image in digital form in real-time by reviewing the page contents prior to submission to the image generation subsystem. The quantity, size, geometry and location of objects on a page are analyzed to generate an internal intermediate description of the page. A determination is made if sufficient resources exist to perform real-time imaging. If real-time imaging cannot be performed, the page will be automatically simplified before the job containing the page is submitted for printing.