Method for host based printing system and method

A method for printing a document having at least one page in a host based printing system, the printing system including a rasterized-image printing device and a computer communicatively coupled to the printing device, the computer having a printing device interface (PDI) and a multi-tasking operating system, and the printing device having a plurality of preselected printing device parameters, the method comprising the steps of:

• operating a resident computer application in connection with the multi-tasking operating system and causing the computer application to produce system graphics resources print data corresponding to each page;
• operating system graphics resources including a rasterizer in connection with the multi-tasking operating system;
• providing the rasterizer with the printing device parameters;
• rasterizing the system graphics resources print data in the rasterizer according to the printing device parameters to produce bitmap data corresponding to each page;
• deriving output-ready data from the bitmap data;
• operating the printer device interface (PDI) in connection with the multi-tasking operating system and temporarily storing in the PDI, a page record for each page to be printed;
• and
• sending the output-ready data to the printing device via the PDI.