1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus that processes a job acquired from an information processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional printing system, an information processing apparatus and an image forming apparatus communicate with each other to process a job. The printing system may suspend a print job, for example, due to occurrence of an error or in response to an interruption by another job, and may later restart the suspended print processing. In this case, as discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-99725, a conventional system manages two pieces of information (i.e., suspended job information and print-finished region information) to control the print processing so as to resume from a breakpoint or restart from the beginning.
In this case, a device that may suspend print processing (including a server in the case of “pull printing”) is generally required to specify a resumption or a reprint of the print job.
Moreover, regarding a print job that may not be independent for each page (e.g., PDF or PDL), it is difficult to control the switching between two options. Therefore, the job suspended device is required to perform the remaining processing based on intermediate data.
If the print job is transferred to another device, for example, due to job archive in a suspended state or in response to interrupt processing, the print suspending device may not execute the print processing. In this case, a job receiver side cannot control the print processing according to a solution or a situation so as to resume the print from a breakpoint or restart the print from the beginning.
According to the above-described conventional printing system, when a job is suspended or when the suspended job is transferred to another device, it is difficult to appropriately determine whether to resume the suspended job from a breakpoint or restart the print from the beginning.
The job receiver side may not be able to perform a print of a transferred job if the solution of a printing machine cannot accept the job. Moreover, whether the print suspending device or the job receiver side attempts to start the job for the purpose of resuming the job once suspended by the different device, it is difficult to execute a continued print (which resumes from a breakpoint) and a full-item reprint (which starts from the beginning).