Patent ID: 8345286

Claim:
A printing system comprising: an information processing apparatus having a general printer driver operating in a course of preparing general print data having a basic instruction; an image forming apparatus performing print operation based on print data including the general print data prepared by the information processing apparatus; and a printer driver storage device storing a specific printer driver operating in a course of preparing specific print data having an instruction specialized for the image forming apparatus, wherein the information processing apparatus further comprises: a printer driver acquisition unit acquiring the specific printer driver stored in the printer driver storage device; a printer connection detection unit allowing a user to select whether or not to acquire the specific printer driver in a case of detecting connection with the image forming apparatus, allowing the printer driver acquisition unit to acquire the specific printer driver based on a selection made by the user, and allowing one of the general and specific printer drivers to correspond to the image forming apparatus; and a print data preparation unit preparing the print data using at least one of the respective general and specific printer drivers corresponded by the printer connection detection unit, wherein the information processing apparatus supports the general printer driver and the specific printer driver, and the general printer driver and the specific printer driver can exist independently of one another and (i) are activated from a print instruction from application software, (ii) are adapted to obtain application data from the application software, and (iii) are adapted to convert the application data into print data readable by the image forming apparatus.