At S608, the compressed binary image data saved in the large-capacity storage device 140 is decompressed and sequentially transferred to the printer 130 in units of pages. At this time, the printer 130 is also notified of information on the image feature quantity in units of pages prior to the decompressed binary image data. This image data transfer processing will be described later. Then, at S609, in the printer 130, printing processing in accordance with the transferred decompressed binary image data is performed. At this time, the parameters relating to the fixing process at the time of performing printing processing for each page, specifically, the fixing temperature and the interval between sheets at the time of sheet conveyance are controlled based on information on the above-described image feature quantity.

The above is the flow of the printing processing according to the present embodiment. In the flow described above, the necessary conversion processing is performed in units of pages, but the conversion processing is not limited to this. For example, it may also be possible to perform conversion processing in units of colors or in units of bands. Further, in a case where N-Up printing is specified in the printing information, it is sufficient to perform processing to combine pages into a page layout in accordance with user specification in the modification unit 213 and to perform binarization or compression processing (S605) for each page after a plurality of pages is put together.

(Image Data Transfer Processing)

Following the above, the image data transfer processing (S608), which is a feature of the present embodiment, is explained in detail. FIG. 7 is a flowchart showing details of the image data transfer processing.