Patent ID: 7372589

Claim:
A printing system having a print control server that corresponds a logical printer to multiple physical printers and supports a distributed printing manner over the physical printers, and a client terminal that specifies one or more of the physical printers associated with the server to make a print request, wherein the print control server comprises: a receiving section that receives the print request from the client terminal; a determining section that determines whether or not print data of the print request contains a print instruction; a print instruction information obtaining section that, if the determining section determines that the print request contains the print instruction, obtains print instruction information from the print data; and a print control section that, if the print instruction information contains a print number specification and the distributed printing manner is specified as a divided output of printing, generates multiple print jobs that correspond to the number of prints specified by the print number specification, divides the generated multiple print jobs and allocates the divided jobs to the physical printers, and instructs each of the physical printers to perform respective one or more of the divided jobs, wherein each of the print jobs includes corresponding contents of the print instruction, wherein the determining section determines whether or not the print data contains print instruction described in Page Description Language (PDL); and the print instruction information obtaining section obtains the print instruction information from the print instruction described in PDL by pre-scanning the print data.