Patent ID: 7576880

Claim:
A method for cooperative rasterization of print data in an enterprise network, the enterprise network including multiple printers, the method comprising: rasterizing, by a primary printer of the multiple printers, a portion of a print job to input raster bits into a raster buffer associated with the primary printer; determining a time taken to rasterize the portion of the print job; identifying, by the primary printer, a potential underflow condition of the raster buffer, the potential underflow condition occurring if the determined time taken to RIP the portion of the print job is greater than a time that will be taken by the primary printer to print the portion of the print job; determining a transit time a secondary printer takes to receive a portion of the print job and determining a receive time it takes the secondary printer to return the corresponding raster data to the primary printer; using the transit time and the receive time to determine secondary printers to be used for rasterizing a portion of un-rasterized portions of the print job for subsequent addition to the raster buffer; responsive to identifying, the primary printer communicating an un-rasterized portion of the print job to the secondary printer for the secondary printer to rasterize, the primary printer not rasterizing the un-rasterized portion; receiving, by the primary printer, raster bits corresponding to the un-rasterized portion from the secondary printer; and printing, by the primary printer, all raster bits corresponding to the print job.