Patent ID: 8345292

Claim:
An information processing apparatus configured to process print data including an object laid out on a page, wherein the page data includes a variable object which varies page by page, a shared object which is referred to by a plurality of pages, and hierarchical attribute information about a page corresponding to the print data, the information processing apparatus comprising: an attribute information analysis unit configured to analyze attribute information included in the print data, measure a number of appearances of an attribute in the print data, select an attribute in a predetermined layer based on the measured number of appearances of the attribute, and determine a priority order of the attribute based on a number of times of references to the shared object from a page corresponding to a record having the selected attribute; an intermediate data generation unit configured to serially select an attribute based on the determined priority order and configured, for the page corresponding to the selected attribute, to generate intermediate data based on an object corresponding to the page; and an image data generation unit configured to generate image data by rasterizing the intermediate data generated by the intermediate data generation unit, wherein the intermediate data generation unit is configured to store intermediate data generated based on the shared object of the generated intermediate data in a predetermined storage unit, configured to extract the intermediate data from the storage unit for a page that refers to the shared object corresponding to the intermediate data that has been already stored in the storage unit, and configured to transfer the extracted intermediate data to the image data generation unit as intermediate data based on which the image data is to be generated.