1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print system having an image reading apparatus and a printing apparatus, and a control method for such a print system. More particularly, the present invention relates to a print system that is designed to occupy the printing apparatus when a copy preparing operation is detected on the side of the image reading apparatus, and a control method for such a print system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, prices of office automation (OA) equipment such as copying machines and multi-function copiers have been going down significantly, and hardware makers who provide customers with such OA equipment are required to take measures to cope with this trend.
There has been proposed a scanner/printer system (print system) which is provided with both a scanner and a printer and designed to perform various types of print processing including copy processing by cooperation of the scanner and the printer.
Such conventional print system is advantageous in being capable of performing the print processing including copy processing with simple configuration. Additionally, the cost for introduction of such print system can be suppressed significantly compared to the cost for introduction of a multi-function copier or a copying machine.
When the print processing is performed by this type of print system using its scanner and printer in combination, original document image data read by the scanner from an original document is described (wrapped) in a page description language before being transferred to and output from the printer.
This conventional print system, however, has a problem in that even though the scanner transmits a copy job after ascertaining that the printer is not performing any operations including printing, if a print job has been meanwhile transmitted thereto by another apparatus such as a host terminal, the copy job from the scanner will not be processed and the user is obliged to wait in front of the scanner until this print job is completed.
As a solution of this problem, there is known a technique described in Japanese Patent Application Publication 2002-135486. According to the technique described in this patent publication, when instructions to execute copying is received from the scanner, the printer is controlled to reject a print operation request or a read operation request from other apparatuses, so that the printer can be occupied until completion of the processing requested by the scanner.
Incidentally, before performing copy processing, it is necessary to perform a copy preparing operation on the scanner side to set various parameters (to designate a paper size and a color mode, and to set image quality parameters).
Therefore, according to the technique disclosed in the Japanese Patent Application Publication 2002-135486 in which the printer is occupied only after the start button (job execution start button) is pressed through the operation panel of the scanner, the copy job will not be executed if the printer receives a print job from other apparatus than the scanner during the parameter setting operations. Thus, there are chances in which the user must wait for a long time in front of the scanner until the print job from the other apparatus is completed.