JP2005178178A - Printing system and printing control method - Google Patents

Abstract

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To create ink color data for printing a character outer periphery portion with only K ink and a character inner portion with process black when black character data is transmitted from an application to a printer driver, and transmitting it to the printer. Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to improve the printing quality even when the printer body does not have such a function.
When character data exists in a print command received from an application at the stage of creating print data in a host computer and the character color of the character data is black, the character data is rasterized and masked. Means for generating data, means for detecting the outer peripheral portion of the rasterized character data, means for generating print data in which the outer peripheral portion of the detected character data is designated to be printed with only the K ink color, and the detected character A printing system and a printing control method comprising means for creating print data in which a portion other than the outer periphery of data is designated to be printed with process black using K ink and CMY ink.
[Selection] Figure 2

Description

  The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, a print control method, and a storage medium storing a print control program, and in particular, print control in an information processing apparatus such as a personal computer that generates print data to be printed by a printing apparatus such as a printer. The present invention relates to a program print control method.

  In raster printers that use pigments for black ink and dyes for other inks, when printing black characters, printing with black ink alone takes time to fix and dry the paper. Due to a problem, a printing process is employed in which printing is not performed using black ink alone, but black ink is ejected after mixing color black (process black) previously created using ink other than black, such as CMY.

  However, the printing process has the following two problems. One is the problem of blurring at the edges due to the process black with dye ink, and the edges of the letters do not become sharp. The other is a problem with the ink landing accuracy, so the ink drop that should have overlapped with the other ink color falls outside the character, so it is slightly black despite being a black character. The problem is that the color appears blurred.

  In order to solve the above two problems, it is known to detect the outer peripheral part of black characters, print only the black ink on the detected part, and print using black as usual in the black character In this way, it is possible to print clear black characters without blurring.

  The following publications describe prior art relating to a method for realizing this recording method.

  (1) When the image data is expanded in the image memory in the printer, if it is determined in the black determination procedure whether there is a black pixel in the expanded image data, the edge extraction means extracts pixels at the edge portion of the expanded image data. To do. In the selector, as a result of the determination by the black determination means and the determination by the edge extraction means, only black is selected for the black edge portion and supplied to the color printer. A method of outputting in halftone or pseudo-halftone is also shown (for example, see Patent Document 1).

  (2) When the dot constituting the black character black line image is extracted by the line image extraction circuit from the combined image data obtained by combining the color image data and the binary monochrome image data, the corresponding bit of the bitmap memory is set to 1. When the bit of the bitmap memory corresponding to the bit of the color signal from the color correction circuit is 1, the color output control circuit converts CMY (3 primary colors) of the color signal to 0 and converts K (black) to the maximum value. A method of outputting and printing with only K ink in the printer engine is shown (for example, see Patent Document 2).

(3) An area which prints an image with little blurring at the boundary between a black image such as black characters and a color image, and ejects the processing liquid in a dot-on-dot relationship with respect to the Bk ink, and also ejects the color ink. Thus, the processing liquid is not ejected in the eight neighboring pixels from which the black ink is ejected. As a result, since there is no processing liquid at the boundary between the black and color areas, the reaction product of the Bk ink and the processing liquid does not flow out to the surroundings, and color ink is applied to the surroundings. It has been shown that bleeding at the boundary between a color image and a black image can be reduced (see, for example, Patent Document 3).
JP-A-5-282500 JP-A-5-83540 JP 2001-18425 A

  In the prior art, the method of detecting the outer peripheral part of black characters and printing only the outer peripheral part with black ink and the inside with process black is employed. However, both are realized in the printer, and cannot be realized unless the printer main body supports this function.

  Therefore, in the present invention, this function is realized even in a model that is not compatible with the printer body by processing data in advance in the host computer. This realizes clear black character printing with little blurring.

  The specific method for that is shown below.

  According to the first aspect of the present invention, in the raster printer capable of printing the ink color data received from the host computer, when the character color of the character data transmitted from the application software is black, the character data The outer peripheral portion is detected from the mask data created by rasterizing the image data, only K color information is added to the outer peripheral portion of the detected mask data, and the color other than the outer periphery of the detected character data is K and CMY colors. A print control method characterized in that print data is created by adding information and printing with process black.

  As described above, according to the present invention, when printing a black character, other inks do not bleed around the character, and the character edge can be sharpened to improve the character quality. This is the effect of the invention.

  Embodiments of the present invention will be described below with reference to the drawings.

  An embodiment of the present invention will be described below with reference to the drawings.

  FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing the configuration of a document editing apparatus to which the present invention is applied. In this figure, reference numeral 101 denotes a CPU that controls the entire apparatus and performs print processing. The CPU 101 controls various operations of the print processing apparatus in accordance with various programs stored in a ROM 108 described later. The CPU 101 stores a ROM 108 for storing fixed data such as a predetermined program and a character pattern via the bus, a RAM 107 for temporarily storing data used for the operation and operation results, and providing a work area for the CPU 101, A video RAM (V-RAM) 103 for storing image data displayed on a display 200 (described later), a display control unit 102 for controlling the display 200 for displaying input image data on a screen, and a keyboard for controlling the keyboard 104 A control unit 300, an external storage control unit 106 that controls writing / reading of data to / from an external storage (HDD) 400 that stores a document file, and a printer control unit 105 that controls a printer 500 that prints out a document are connected to each other. Has been. The ROM 108 includes an IPL program that becomes an OS (operating system) at the time of system startup, an IOCS (Input Output Control System) program for performing input / output control of the display 200, the keyboard 104, the HDD 400, and character font data. It is a fixed memory to store.

  The storage area of the RAM 107 is divided and used for each predetermined application, and serves to temporarily store data being processed.

  The keyboard 300 is an operation panel provided with keys for inputting alphanumeric characters, hiragana and the like, and function keys such as a cursor movement key, an execution key, and a stop key. When any key on the keyboard 300 is operated, the keyboard control unit 104 converts the key into a predetermined key code corresponding to the key, and outputs the key code to the CPU 101. The printer 500 is for printing out a document stored in the RAM 103 in accordance with format information preset by the creator. However, the printer 500 is capable of printing in both the page description language and the image data.

  Note that the print processing program (printer driver) of the present invention is stored in the ROM 108 or the external storage unit 400, and is read into the RAM 107 as necessary and executed by the CPU 101 to realize this function.

  Next, the operation of this embodiment will be described. FIG. 2 is a diagram showing a series of processes from when printing is executed by application software until the printing process is completed. This process is started when printing is executed by application software.

  Step 201 is print data transmitted from the application. The print data is assumed to be a mixture of image data, graphics data, and character data, but not all of them need to exist. The image data and graphics data are rasterized in step 202 and converted to RGB data. In step 203, the data is transferred to the printer. On the other hand, in step 205, rasterization processing of character data is performed. This is stored as mask data (W) of zero inside the character and one outside the character as in step 206. In step 207, the edge portion is detected from the mask data, and stored as edge data (E) in which one pixel of the edge portion is 1 and the other portion is zero. In step 208, CMYK binary data is created for each line from the mask data created in step 206 and the edge data created in step 207. At this time, the logical calculation of the mask data and the edge data is performed, and the part which is E, that is, the edge part is (C, M, Y, K) = (0, 0, 0, 1), NOT (W) AND NOT The process black data is used for the part inside (E), that is, the inside of the character other than the edge part. , 0, 0) shall be set. In step 209, the CMYK binary data created in step 208 is transmitted to the printer. In step 204, the RGB data transmitted in step 203 and the CMYK binary data transmitted in step 209 are combined by the printer, and printing is performed.

  Here, the features of the present invention will be described.

  The present invention is a control program for a raster printer having a function of processing ink color data transmitted from a host computer. When the character color of character data is black, the edge portion is detected after the character data is rasterized. This is characterized in that ink color binary data is created only by K at the edge portion and by process black inside the other characters.

1 is a block diagram showing the configuration of a printer control system according to an embodiment of the present invention. The figure which shows a series of processing until printing is executed from application software.

Explanation of symbols

101 CPU
102 Display control unit 103 VRAM
104 Keyboard control unit 105 Printer control unit 106 External storage control unit 107 RAM
108 ROM
200 Display 300 Keyboard 400 External Storage 500 Printer

Claims (2)

  When character data exists in the print command received from the application and the character color of the character data is black at the stage of creating the print data in the host computer, the character data is rasterized and mask data is created. Means for detecting the outer peripheral portion of the rasterized character data, means for creating print data in which the outer peripheral portion of the detected character data is designated to be printed only with the K ink color, and other than the outer periphery of the detected character data A printing system comprising means for creating print data that is designated to be printed with process black using K ink and CMY ink.   When character data exists in the print command received from the application and the character color of the character data is black at the stage of creating the print data in the host computer, the character data is rasterized and mask data is created. Means for detecting the outer peripheral portion of the rasterized character data, means for creating print data in which the outer peripheral portion of the detected character data is designated to be printed only with the K ink color, and other than the outer periphery of the detected character data A printing control method characterized by comprising means for creating print data that is designated to be printed with process black using K ink and CMY ink.

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