Patent Document ID: 7870486
Application ID: 11736969

Base Claim:
1. A system for simultaneously commencing output of disparately encoded electronic documents comprising: a document processing device including a processor and associated data storage; means adapted for receiving, into the document processing device, selection data representative of a plurality of different user-selected electronic documents, each of the plurality of documents being encoded in a unique one of a plurality of disparate formats; association means adapted for associating each of the plurality of disparate formats with at least one software module; means adapted for retrieving the plurality of user-selected electronic documents in accordance with received selection data; means adapted for communicating each of the plurality of user-selected electronic documents to one of a plurality of corresponding software modules in accordance with an output of the association means; means adapted for acquiring common document output characteristics associated with each of the plurality of user-selected electronic documents; means adapted for communicating configuration data corresponding to acquired document output characteristics to each of a plurality of unique software modules in a format compatible thereto; and document processor means adapted for commencing a selected document processing operation on each of a series of the user-selected electronic documents by calling a sequence of the software modules, with each module corresponding to one of the series of user-selected electronic documents such that each module is operative in accordance with the common document output characteristics.

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Claim 5:
5. The system for simultaneously commencing output of disparately encoded electronic documents of claim 1 further comprising means adapted for communicating an output of each software module to a common document output device.