US Patent 7796300 High-speed printing method having parallel processes

A method of printing having the steps of receiving compressed page data that includes both continuous tone (“contone”) data and foreground bi-level data, and decompressing the contone data and the foreground bi-level data in parallel. The method also includes the steps of halftoning the contone data to bi-level color data and compositing the foreground bi-level data over the bi-level color data to create composited bi-level color image data, wherein the steps of halftoning and compositing are performed in parallel. The method also includes the step of printing the composited bi-level color image data.