Patent ID: 8351067

Claim:
A system comprising: an image forming apparatus including a storage unit to store image data files according to print control instructions of printing data files received by the image forming apparatus, each image data file containing one or more pages of data to be printed and excluding print control instructions, and a print unit to print on sheets of paper according to print instructions; and a terminal device connected to the image forming apparatus via a network, the terminal device to generate a first document using a first application program and a second document using a second application program, the terminal device using a printer driver to convert the first document and the second document into a first printing data file and a second printing data file and transmitting the first printing data file and the second printing data file to the image forming apparatus, the terminal device is operable to display a list of files, including first and second image data files excluding print control instructions corresponding to the first printing data file and the second printing data file, stored in the storage unit of the image forming apparatus, to select the first and second image data files excluding print control instructions to be merged from the displayed list of files, to select a merging option to create a new merged file by merging the selected image data files and to designate a page location of the second image data file in order to insert at least one page of the first image data file, wherein a control unit of the image forming apparatus performing a merging operation to generate a new merged file by merging pages of the selected image data files in image data format according to the selected merging option, wherein a print unit of the image forming apparatus prints the new merged file on sheets of printing medium, and wherein the merging operation to merge pages of the selected image data files is performed while the selected image data files exist in the image data format that excludes print control instructions.