A method of printing on a sheet having top, bottom, left and right edges, and having a right edge to left edge width dimension (W), and a top edge to bottom edge height dimension (H), the sheet containing W-times-H individually printable areas (PELS) which may be either printed in a color or left uncolored, using an all-pels-addressable (APA) printer, and the printer feeding the sheet through a print station with the sheet's top edge as the leading edge, comprising:
- providing a page memory having at least W-times-H PEL memory locations, and a cursor which is movable within said page memory, the cursor's position being identified by W and H dimensions within said page memory, and the cursor's position identifying an individual PEL area on said sheet and a corresponding PEL memory location is said page memory, the binary number content of said page memory location determining whether the corresponding sheet PEL area will be colored or left uncolored;
- providing a source of print fonts, each font having a unique font identifying number, and each font comprising a plurality of characters, each character being defined by h parallel raster scan lines, each raster scan line being w PELs long, and each individual PEL containing a binary bit, the multiplicity of binary bits in the multiplicity of raster lines defining the character, the character also having
- (a) a unique character identifying number,
- (b) a rectangular character box of h-times-w PEL areas, said character box having h raster scan lines, each of w-PEL length, and containing within said character box the binary content of the raster scan lines defining the character's image,
- (c) an L/T number defining the number of PELS which exist between the left edge of its character box and the location of the starting cursor position for the character,
- (d) and R/B number defining the number of PELS which exist between the right edge of its character box and the location of the ending cursor position for the character, and
- (e) a cursor line (CL) offset number defining the number of PELS which exist between the top edge of its character box and the location of a cursor line which connects the character's staring cursor position and its ending cursor position,
- composing a page to be printed by defining a font whose characters may be loaded into page memory to compose a page image,
- loading selected characters from said font into said page memory in accordance with the character's L/T, R/B and CL numbers, whereupon each ending cursor position for a character becomes the starting cursor position for the next character, and the cursor lines of all characters are aligned to define scan lines within said page memory;
- and
- scanning the memory locations of said page memory, while applying the resulting binary content of each of said memory locations to said print station, as said printer prints corresponding PEL areas of said sheet.