Patent ID: 7167259

Claim:
A method of merging display items in an encoded format, comprising: providing a plurality of compressed display items to be merged, the compressed display items comprising compressed rasterized line work, contone objects that are to be combine to produce a final merged output for an imaging system; defining a target item having a target area, the target area being defined by a boundary that extends from a leftmost pixel of a leftmost display item of the plurality of compressed display items to a rightmost pixel of a rightmost display item of the plurality of compressed display items; decompresssing each of the plurality of compressed display items to form tokens; assigning each of the plurality of decompressed display items a priority; examining the decompressed display items based on the assigned item priority; aligning each of the decompressed display items relative to the n pixel boundaries within the target area; merging the decompressed display items in the target area to produce the final merged output for an imaging system according to item priority and pixel control data to produce the target item, the target item representative of the merged plurality of display items; and re-compressing the merged display items to produce the final merged output for an imaging system.