A printer managing apparatus includes a physical printer managing unit for managing the outputting of the attribute information of individual physical printers and controlling the outputting of a job to the physical printers, a logical printer attribute information generating unit for logically selecting the attribute information of the physical printer from the physical printer managing unit for managing attribute information of physical printers to generate attribute information of a logical printer, and a logical-printer attribute-information managing unit for managing the generated attribute information of the logical printers. With such an arrangement, the attribute information set in the logical printer is obtained from the attribute information of the individual physical printers that form the logical printer. Therefore, the attribute information of the logical printer may more properly be set than by a manager.
Disclosed is a system for routing print jobs to one of a plurality of printers or print queues, such as a logical print queue. After providing a print job, a set of printers capable of printing the print job is determined. The set of printers is queried to determine status information thereon. A criterion is then applied to the status information for the set of printers to determine a subset of printers. The determined subset is dependent upon the determined status information. A printer is selected from the subset and the print job is routed to the selected printer.
In an image processing system in which a plurality of image processing apparatuses and a management apparatus are connected to each other via a network, the management apparatus forms the image processing apparatuses into one or more groups based on apparatus attribute information, acquires control variable value information from an image processing apparatus in a group, and sends the acquired information to the other image processing apparatuses in the group. The other image processing apparatuses receive the control variable value information sent from the management apparatus, and execute image processing based on the received information.
A computer-based printing system, comprised a client computing device, optionally one or more server computing devices, a virtual printer driver, one or more printer drivers, a print processor, print spooler, and one or more printers, means for initiating a print job(s), all or in part, or one or more copies of a document(s), in a local, network or remote, single or multi-user, printing environment, and a means to select the best fit printer based on printer capabilities, print quality and printer availability, without manually enumeration of each printer driver and printer status monitor.
A system for selecting a network-connected image forming apparatus wherein there are provided a plurality of network-connected image forming apparatuses and job registration means which distributes and registers a job in an image forming apparatus via a network, wherein the job registration means registers a specific mode job in an image forming apparatus already storing another specific mode job.
