Patent ID: 7916342

Claim:
A printing system comprising: a client; and a server that uses a spool file provided by an operating system for temporarily storing intermediate data for output in response to an instruction to output document data, wherein said client has a previewer and a user interface driver, and said server has a print processor and a graphical driver, wherein said user interface driver activates said previewer if a preview setting has been set responsive to a print start event which has been received by said user interface driver, wherein said print processor generates an empty preview file responsive to an image generation request received from said previewer, informs said graphical driver of a preview file name and start of preview, reads the intermediate data stored in the spool file to generate printing page data, and delivers the printing page data to the graphical driver, wherein said graphical driver generates image data from the printing page data and stores the generated image data in the preview file, wherein said print processor transmits the image data stored in the preview file to said client, and wherein said previewer performs a preview based on the image data received from said print processor of said server.