This invention relates to a method for printing an image to fit a printable area of a medium and more particularly for printing a reformatted image to fit a printable area of a medium on a printer wherein the image is originally formatted for an area of a medium on another printer. The reformatted image being printed on the printable area with a format proportional to that of the original image.
Works produced on a computer usually result in hard copies of the works being made on a printer. The hard copies or printouts are made on standard-sized media, such as A4-size or Letter-size standard paper, on the printer. A user formats the work by performing tasks such as selecting margins, font types, font sizes, locations to position graphics and other tasks to obtain a desirable image on a computer screen. The image is said to have a particular format corresponding to the various selections. The work is represented as print data before being sent to the printer for printing. A number of components in a printing system in the computer modify and convert the print data into various data forms during printing. The printer eventually makes a reproduction of the image on a medium.
Mechanical tolerances of parts and limitations in mechanical design of a printer usually cause the printer to be unable to print to the full physical extent of a medium. In other words, the printer is unable to print to the edges of the medium. There is a border region along the edges of the medium that the printer is unable to print to. Left, right, top and bottom boundaries from the respective medium edges define the limits for printing. The area enclosed by these boundaries is known as the printable area. The area outside of this printable area on the medium is known as the unprintable area. The printable areas on a particular medium may vary from printer to printer.
A work area on a page is specified by a set of left, right, top and bottom margins. A user selects these margins by specifying the distance of these margins from the respective edges of a medium. In some applications, such as those for word processing, extra information such as headers, footers and line numbers are included on the area outside of the work area. In such applications, the work area is defined to encompass more than just the area enclosed by the specified margins. The work area in such applications is defined to cover the full extent of all the extra information added to a page. If the work area fall within the printable area of the medium, the work produced in the work area can be printed completely on the medium. If, however, the work area encroaches on the unprintable area, the part of the work which lies in the unprintable area will not be printed.
The boundaries of printer-supported media are reported to a software application when the printer is selected in the application. The application may use these boundaries to allow a user to preview the work as it would be printed on the respective media. In other words, the application offers what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) capability. The application may also verify user-selected margins with the reported boundaries. This verification checks that the user-selected margins fall within the printable areas specified by the boundaries. The application presents a boundary-exceeded warning if the margins are outside of the boundaries. To ensure that the image of the work is completely printed, the user has to reformat the work.
With prices of printers becoming cheaper, it is not uncommon for commercial organizations and even individuals to own two or more printers with complementary features. For example, an organization or a user may have a laser printer and an ink jet printer. The user may use the laser printer for faster and higher resolution printing and the ink jet printer for making color printouts. The laser printer may also be used to print draft copies of work produced on a computer and the ink jet printer used to produce a final color copy. These printers usually have different printable areas. These printable areas differ in size and position on a page. The differences pose a problem during printing. As an example, consider a scenario where a user selects a laser printer as a default printer for an application. The user chooses margins which are equal to the boundaries when working on a letter-sized medium on this laser printer. In between iterations of the work, the user makes hard copies of the work on the laser printer. The laser printer faithfully reproduces hard copies of the work as viewed on the computer screen. The user then decides that the work is satisfactory and wants to print a formal color copy on the ink jet printer. The user then selects the ink jet printer without changing the default margins set for the laser printer. Assume that the ink jet printer has a printable area which is smaller or of a different position as compared to the laser printer. The selection of the ink jet printer results in an error message which reports that one or more margins of the page encroaches on the unprintable area of the ink jet printer. The user is warned of this encroachment and prompted to decide whether to have the margins modified to that equal to the boundaries of the medium on the ink jet printer or to ignore the warning. If the user chooses to modify the margins, the format of the work as viewed on the computer screen and subsequently the image for printing will change accordingly. If the user ignores the warning, the image will be clipped when printed. Parts of the image falling outside the printable area will not be printed. Not only is information lost in such an incomplete printout, the format of the original image is also lost. To get a printout without any loss of information, the user can reset the margins of the page to fall on or within the printable area of the ink jet printer. This may have the desirable effect of retaining all information but the format of the original image is still lost. This change in format may be unacceptable to a user. The user will have to reformat the work to retain a look of the work which is close to the original work. These modifications are known to be very cumbersome.
From the above, there is therefore a need for a method of printing a reformatted version of an image, which is originally formatted for a first area, on a printable second area of a printer such that the reformatted image has a format proportional to that of the original image.
In accordance with the preferred embodiment of the invention, a method is provided to reformat an image to fit a printable area on a medium. More specifically, the image is originally formatted to fit a first area of a medium. This first area may be an entire surface of a medium, a printable area of a medium or an area defined by margins anywhere on the medium. The print data defining the original image is then scaled to give a reformatted image which fits a printable second area on a medium on a printer. The first and second areas are different. A scaling factor is obtained using dimensions which specify the first area and the printable second area. This determination of the scaling factor is performed in a printer driver according to the preferred embodiment. Also according to the preferred embodiment, the actual scaling of print data is performed by an application. If the first area is a printable area of a medium on a first printer, the reformatting of image allows the second printer to emulate the first printer in printing the image.
In one aspect of the embodiment, medium dimensions and dimensions which specify the printable second area are used to determine the scaling factor.
Formatting an image by scaling the original print data allows the formatted image to have a format proportional to that of the original image.