Patent ID: 7880918

Claim:
A computer system for generating an output representation, the computer system comprising a processor coupled to a computer storage medium, the computer storage medium having stored thereon a plurality of computer software components executable by the processor, the computer software components comprising: an input interface to receive an electronic document; a rendering engine that is configured for communicating with the input interface to receive the electronic document, and for generating a set of device independent primitives from the electronic document by applying graphical device language (GDL) thereto, wherein the device independent primitives include standardized graphical output functions that represent content of the electronic document; a mediation engine for conditioning the set of device independent primitives into the output representation, wherein conditioning comprises: (a) automatically accessing functionality specific to an output device via a device driver that is capable of communicating with various output devices; (b) examining the output-device functionality to negotiate high-quality output and determining whether the device independent primitives are optimally expressed when compared against the examined output-device functionality; (c) when the output-device functionality is specific to the output device, substituting or adding routines to the set of device independent primitives based on the output device-specific functionality, wherein the conditioned set of device independent primitives form the output representation that is compatible with the output device without the use of additional device drivers; and (d) when the output-device functionality is not specific to the output device, reverting to the initially generated set of device independent primitives; and the device driver that acts as an output interface to the various output devices including the output device, the output device being configured to generate output based on the output representation.