Appeal No. 2003-0237
Application No. 09/157,895
analogous device driver function implemented by the universal
driver” (col. 4, lines 4-8).
The appellants have submitted a declaration by Zhanbing Wu
(filed September 14, 2001, paper no. 8), who is a co-inventor of
the Shaw system and the present system, wherein Wu states:
6. Unlike the system of Shaw, et al. ‘843 that
requires the printer manufacturers to develop the
binary printer characterization, the system of the
present application allows the use of text based
minidrivers that have text based characterizations of
the printers. The modular universal driver then
incorporates this text based characterization and
implements the device specific driver functions in
accordance with the incorporated text based
characterization. The modular nature of the universal
driver, and in particular the inclusion of the parser
module illustrated in FIG. 6 of the present
application, is what allows the use of the text based
characterization. Specifically, the parser module of
the modular universal driver parses the text based
characterization of the printer to derive the internal
binary data structures. The parser is called only once
when the printer is installed. After that, the
universal driver accesses the cached binary data
structures unless the text based characterization has
since been updated.
7. The UniDriver of Shaw, et al. ‘843 is not modular
and cannot parse a text file to derive the binary data
structures. This is why the minidrivers of Shaw, et
al. ‘843 must be binary to start with. Because the
system of the present application utilizes a modular
universal driver, the minidrivers may be simply text
based and may have text based characterizations of the
printer. The modular universal driver can then simply
parse the text file to derive the internal binary data
structures via one of its modules (the parser module in
a preferred embodiment).
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