Patent ID: 7672521

Claim:
A method of selective page composition in a processor-controlled imaging system, comprising: receiving formatted image data representing at least one page element for each page of a plurality of pages at a processor of an imaging device; applying, at the processor of the imaging device, one of: scaling, rotation, and skew to a vector element of the formatted image data during a raster image processor (RIP) process to generate a processed vector element such that the processed vector element of the image data is in a native resolution and a native color space of the imaging device: generating, at the processor of the imaging device, at least one compressed cell describing each page element based on a size and a position of each page element included in the received formatted image data, wherein the compressed cell contains pixilated image data, and presents a transparency condition, and a predetermined pixel size; generating, at the processor of the imaging device, an element table including a cell pointer for each page element wherein the cell pointer is used to indicate a memory location and a cell type for the generated at least one compressed cell compression; and selectively merging, at the processor of the imaging device, the cell data based on the cell type entries of the element tables, so as to compose a merged page, wherein a first portion of the image data of the merged page is not accessed during merging of the cell data to compose the merged page, and where only a second portion of the image data is accessed during merging of the cell data to compose the merged page, the second portion of the image data being semi-transparent areas that are mixed with a background within the merged page.