Virtual printer

A method of driving a plurality of heterogeneous presentation devices comprising the steps of:

• receiving a printer data stream and associated presentation device control information on behalf of a presentation device, the printer data stream including source data in the form of text, image, and/or graphics;
• reducing the source data to an intermediate format, the intermediate format being one of a number of widely supported formats;
• generating device-specific data and device-specific control information for the presentation device based upon the intermediate format and controls embedded in the printer data stream;
• and
• driving the presentation device by providing the device-specific data and device-specific control information to the presentation device.

A method of driving a variety of presentation devices comprising the steps of:

• receiving a device independent data stream corresponding to a presentation job, the device independent data stream including data formatted according to a widely supported format;
• converting the data to a device dependent format;
• generating one or more presentation units appropriate for the presentation device, each of the one or more presentation units capable of containing device-specific data and device-specific control information, and
• driving the presentation device by providing it with a data stream that is natively supported by the presentation device, the data stream including the one or more presentation units.

A method of driving a variety of presentation devices comprising the steps of:

• receiving a device independent data stream corresponding to a presentation job;
• producing a data stream that is natively supported by the presentation device by
• generating one or more presentation units each containing device-specific data and capable of containing device-specific control information, and
• wrapping the one or more presentation units in a page description language;
• and
• driving the presentation device with the data steam.

A machine-readable medium having stored thereon data representing sequences of instructions,

• said sequences of instructions which, when executed by a processor, cause said processor to perform the steps of:receiving a presentation job on behalf of a presentation device, the presentation job including a data stream which includes source data in the form of text, image, graphics, and/or other embedded objects;
• reducing the source data to an intermediate format, the intermediate format being one of a number of widely supported formats;
• generating device-specific data and device-specific control information for the presentation device based upon the intermediate format and control information associated with the data stream;
• and driving the presentation device by providing the device-specific data and device-specific control information to the presentation device.