Patent ID: 7391529

Claim:
A document printing method comprising: receiving a document for printing encoded in a page description language and including at least one selected reusable document component; rasterizing the document to generate rasterized document pages corresponding to the document, the rasterizing including querying a reusable document component repository containing stored previously rasterized image representations of reusable document components to locate a selected stored previously rasterized image representation corresponding to the selected reusable document component and, conditional upon the querying, (i) identifying one of the stored previously rasterized image representations as corresponding to the selected reusable document component and retrieving the identified stored previously rasterized image representation corresponding to the selected reusable document component, or, (ii) not identifying one of the stored previously rasterized image representations as corresponding to the selected reusable document component, generating a rasterized image representation of the selected reusable document component and storing the generated rasterized image representation in the reusable document component repository, the storing of the generated rasterized image representation in the reusable document component repository including, prior to the storing, compressing the image; and printing the rasterized document pages to produce a printed document corresponding to the received document.