US Patent 7259770 Method and apparatus for processing information

A printer driver generates output data adapted to the processing power of a printer. When the printer driver receives a draw command from an operating system, a complexity value of the draw command is calculated depending on the type of the command and/or the number of contour points of a clipping area included as a parameter of the command. A processing mode is selected depending on the complexity relative to first and second threshold values. In a first processing mode, a draw command to draw image data and a clip command are simply output. In a second processing mode, a draw command to draw image elements generated in accordance with a clip command is output. In a third processing mode, mask data is generated from a clip command, and a command to calculate the logical AND between image data and the mask data is output.