Importance

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Abstract

A printing system includes a plurality of print engines; a raster printer controller having a processor for generating the rasterized bitmap data; and a plurality of print engine communication devices, where each of the print engine communication devices are coupled to a corresponding one of the print engines to provide the rasterized bitmap data to the corresponding print engine. The print engine communication devices are coupled together with the raster printer controller in a daisy chain configuration by a data link. Each of the print engine communication devices includes a message processing circuit that is adapted to monitor data received from raster printer controller, execute commands embedded in data received, update a bitmap data memory storage buffer in the print engine communication device with rasterized bitmap data embedded in the data received from the raster printer controller. Further, the bitmap memory data storage buffer includes a status line for indicating a need for additional rasterized bitmap data, and the message processing circuit is also adapted to transmit a message on its output port indicative of the status line so that the raster printer controller is able to perform on-demand dispatching of the rasterized bitmap data to the print engines,

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First Claim