Patent ID: 8755060

Claim:
A print control apparatus comprising: a plurality of rendering units that perform rendering in response to a print instruction described in a page description language; a print instruction storage unit that stores the print instruction for printing a plurality of pages; a distribution unit that sequentially distributes process requests and reference information to the plurality of rendering units, each of the process requests specifying which of the pages is to be rendered, the reference information being for accessing the print instruction stored in the print instruction storage unit; and a process request storage unit capable of storing the plurality of process requests, wherein the plurality of rendering units each execute rendering by accessing the print instruction stored in the print instruction storage unit on the basis of the reference information distributed by the distribution unit, and extracting a part of the print instruction of a page specified by a corresponding one of the process requests distributed by the distribution unit to image data, and wherein, when there is a rendering unit to which a process request is distributable in ascending order of page numbers, the distribution unit distributes the process request to the rendering unit to which the process request is distributable in ascending order, and, when there is no rendering unit to which a process request is distributable in ascending order of the page numbers, the distribution unit temporarily stores the process request in the process request storage unit, selects a process request with a smallest page number from among a plurality of process requests stored in the process request storage unit and distributes the selected process request to one of the plurality of rendering units.