Apple Patents Aimed at Making Mobile Printing Much Easier

Apple has filed two patents that outline methods for making printing from mobile devices much easier, including printing without print drivers.

The Apple patents filed with the U.S. Patent Office were first observed by ConceivablyTech.

The first patent, which can be accessed here, outlines a system that can identify available wireless printers. Once the system identifies a printer, it generates print data for the print job via one of two methods. First, it can use a driverless printing technique that involves obtaining the printer’s capability information from the printer and then generates printer data for the selected printer based on the printer’s capability. Alternatively, the system could use a printer-specific driver for the selected printer to generate the printer data.

The system can also send the print job to a Cloud service. The Cloud service would include one or more servers that provide a printing service, so that the Cloud service could generate the printer data. Finally, the system sends the printer data to the printer.

The second patent involves a computer-readable storage medium that stores a data structure for printing without a print driver. The data structure specifies the following printer capabilities: resolution, color spaces, bit depths, input slots; face-up/face-down paper-input orientation, output bins, face-up/face-down paper output orientation, simplex or duplex printing, media types, supported document finishing, etc. According to Apple, this data structure would enable a device to generate printer data for the printer without the need for the client device, such as a smartphone or tablet PC,  to maintain information about the printer.