Virtual bin collator control
 The invention concerns a method of controlling a multi-bin sheet collator. Adjacent collator bins are treated as one virtual bin and sheet feeding is controlled appropriately by skipping bins if the number of sets to be collated equals or is smaller than half the number of bins. Thus, multi-page documents having a number of pages exceeding the capacity of a single bin can be collated. In a combined copier/collator the number of copies selected by the operator determines the number of sets, and thus the size and grouping of the virtual bins. 
International Business Machines Corporation
B B
B65H B65H
inventional inventional
Carl A. Frederick W. James C.
Queener Johnson Rogers