Abstract: An improved printer is provided that uses a hard disk drive resident in the printer to temporarily store some of the page data of print jobs received by this printer. Since disk access time is relatively slow as compared to access time of random access memory (RAM), only a minimal amount of pages are initially stored on the hard disk drive while the remaining pages of a print job continue to be stored in RAM, such that the pages on the hard disk drive are interleaved with those stored in RAM. Once the pages are stored on the hard disk drive, some of the areas of RAM where they previously resided are released, which allows the printer to free up some of its RAM. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, only every fourth page is initially stored on the hard disk drive, which effectively spreads out the effects of the slower disk access time across several pages as they are printed.

Abstract: A high speed printing system including a host computer, a printer controller and a print engine. The printing system can operate in a normal mode where a high level page description language is used to convey page information from the host computer to the printer controller. The system further permits rasterization of a page to be printed at the host computer and the downloading of rasterized page data to the printer controller in a form that the data can be directly serialized to the print engine.