SHARED RESOURCE CLUSTERED PRINTING SYSTEM

The present invention is concerned with a character input device, a disc memory, an output marker, and a character generator for converting byte format character information into an output marker bit stream format, and for allocating the converted bit streams onto the disc memory. The stored bit streams can then be retrieved to directly drive the output marker or to be re-allocated onto the disc memory (after merging with presently converted bit streams if appropriate). In another feature of the invention, the converted or generated bit streams are represented in a compressed form (described by a four bit run length code). These bit streams in the compressed form can be merged by the character generator directly into this compressed form without having to first decompress the bit streams, merge, and then compress again. Also printing systems can be configured using one or more character generators committed to one or more disc memories, and in turn, each disc memory can drive one or more printers.