Patent ID: 8498000

Claim:
A spool control device comprising: image data creation sections each of which interprets a page description language and creates a piece of image data acceptable by a printer; a first measurement section that measures a creation speed with which the pieces of image data are created by the image data creation sections; a spool section that spools the pieces of image data created by the image data creation sections; a second measurement section that measures an output speed with which the pieces of image data created by the image data creation sections and spooled by the spool section are output from the spool section to the printer; and a controller that has, as schemes of controlling an order in which the pieces of image data of individual processing units created by the image data creation sections are written onto the spool section, a first scheme of writing the pieces of image data of the individual processing units from the individual image data creation sections onto the spool section in an order in which the pieces of image data of the individual processing units are to be output to the printer, and a second scheme of writing the pieces of image data of the individual processing units created by the image data creation sections from the individual image data creation sections onto the spool section in an order in which the pieces of image data of the individual processing units have been created, that selectively employs any of the first scheme and the second scheme on the basis of the creation speed and the output speed, and that controls an order in which the pieces of image data of the individual processing units are written from the image data creation sections onto the spool section in accordance with the employed scheme.