System and method for efficient tile generation from complex raster data

A system and method for accepting raster data from a Postscript or equivalent image data generator, identifying portions of the raster image which contain continuous tone data and linework data, dividing those portions into separate tiles and compressing the data within each tile by a compression method optimized for the type of image data within the tile. The compression algorithms are based upon conventional JPEG or LZW techniques, but enhanced to more efficiently process image data sets with large amounts of blank data.