Abstract: A host based printing system for printing a page of a document. The system has a rasterized-image printing device for printing the page and a computer having a multi-tasking operating system. The computer includes an interface to the printing device, system memory, a resident computer application operated to produce system graphics resources data, a rasterizer rasterizing the data to produce bitmap data, a bitmap driver providing the rasterizer with printing device parameters, and a printing device interface (PDI). The PDI has a database, a print controller, and a port handler. The database has a page record for the page and a document record for the document, and the page record is updated when the page is output-ready. The print controller communicates with the database to determine whether a page is output-ready and locks at least a portion of the output-ready data for the page into physical memory. The port handler transfers the data to the printing device and receives messages from the printing device.

Abstract: A host based printing system for printing a page of a document is disclosed. The system has a rasterized-image printing device for printing the page and a computer having a multi-tasking operating system. The computer includes an interface to the printing device, system memory, a resident computer application operated to produce system graphics resources data, a rasterizer rasterizing the data to produce bitmap data, a bitmap driver providing the rasterizer with printing device parameters, and a printing device interface (PDI). The PDI has a database, a print controller, and a port handler. The database has a page record for the page and a document record for the document, and the page record is updated when the page is output-ready. The print controller communicates with the database to determine whether a page is output-ready and locks at least a portion of the output-ready data for the page into physical memory.