Patent attributes
Systems and methods provide a mechanism to print documents having transparent artwork that overlaps other artwork. One aspect of the systems and methods includes sending the document to a printer control system coupled to a printer. The printer control system detects overlapping areas, and processes the artwork into separate atomic regions. Objects contributing to the atomic region are placed in an object stack. A rasterizer having knowledge of the printer characteristics creates object raster buffers for the portions of the objects that contribute to the atomic region. The object raster buffers are then blended according to transparency values associated with the object to create an atomic region raster buffer. The atomic region raster buffer is combined with other atomic region raster buffers and raster images for other non-overlapping objects into a printer raster buffer that may be processed by the printer to produce a page.
