Texture printing system

A method for supporting texture printing comprising:

• converting, with a rasterizer, an input image with texture information to color data and texture attribute plane data, wherein a first bit for defining each pixel in the texture attribute plane data comprises a change bit and the rasterizer is further configured to:
• compare texture information associated with a pixel (pixel n) with texture information associated with the previous pixel (pixel n−1) to determine whether the texture information of pixel n and pixel n−1 are the same, wherein the texture information associated with each pixel specifies a physical thickness of texture ink to be printed at the pixel;
• and
• set the change bit of pixel n to zero when the texture information associated with pixel n is the same as pixel n−1;
• compressing, with a data compressor, the color data and the texture attribute plane data into compressed image data;
• storing, on a memory device, the compressed image data prior to printing;
• decompressing, with a data decompressor, the compressed image data to retrieve the color data and the texture attribute plane data;
• converting, with a color converter and a halftoner, the color data to color halftone data;
• and
• combining, with a texture data generator, the texture attribute plane data decompressed by the data decompressor and the color halftone data from the halftoner to generate output ink data for a printer engine to print the input image with texture.

A method for supporting texture printing comprising:

• receiving an input image with texture information;
• generating texture attribute plane data based on the texture information of the input image, wherein bits defining each pixel in the texture attribute plane data comprise a first bit corresponding to a change bit, at least one bit specifying a texture type, and at least one bit specifying a texture thickness;
• comparing texture information associated with a pixel (pixel n) with texture information associated with the previous pixel (pixel n−1) to determine whether the texture information of pixel n and pixel n−1 are the same, wherein the texture information associated with each pixel specifies a physical thickness of texture ink to be printed at the pixel;
• and
• setting the change bit of pixel n to zero when the texture information associated with pixel n is the same as pixel n−1 and setting the change bit of pixel n to one when the texture information associated with pixel n is different from pixel n−1 to generate texture attribute plane data for the input image;
• generating color data for the input image;
• and
• storing the texture attribute plane data and the color data for printing.