Patent ID: 6934051

Claim:
A printer which draws page data for outputting one page at a time, the page data being edited from a line printer output format to a page format based on format information, said printer comprising: one master board and one or more slave boards each executing: pre-editing processing in which a temporary page change position delimiting pages is calculated with the data unedited; editing processing in which data in a next page following the temporary page change position is edited based on the format information to define an actual page change position and the temporary page change position is corrected by the actual page change position to define the page data of the next page; and drawing processing in which the page data is drawn, wherein said master board and slave boards execute the pre-editing processing of the data before the editing processing and the drawing processing, wherein said master board comprises: a basic unit transferring the data and control information to or from processing units and to or from said slave boards, wherein said processing units, all connected to said basic unit, comprise: a receiver which receives data from a host computer; a receiving buffer in which the data is stored; a pre-editing unit which acquires data from said receiving buffer and calculates the temporary page change position; a second format information storage unit in which format information on a next page following the temporary page change position is stored; a first format information storage unit in which format information common to edited pages is accumulated by obtaining the format information on the edited pages from said second format information storage unit; an editing unit which edits the next page following the temporary page change position defined by said pre-editing unit to define the actual page change position based on the format information stored in said first and second format information storage units, corrects the temporary page change position with the actual page change position, and defines the page data of the next page; a drawing unit which generates drawing data from the page data, a print controller which converts the drawing data into video output data; an output controller which transfers the video output data sent from said print controller and from a print controller of said slave boards to a printer engine to manage a page of the video output data; and a user interface which sends or receives operation information to or from an operator panel operated by a user.