1. A method for generating a compressed bitmap in a printing environment, the: method comprising: associating a meta-data structure with each portion of a plurality of portions of a bitmap memory wherein each meta-data structure includes a type of data field indicating a type of data associated with said each portion and wherein each meta-data structure includes a data indicator field indicating the data associated with said each portion; processing a sequence of data objects defining the content of the bitmap memory wherein the processing of each data object includes: determining which portions of the bitmap memory would be affected by the data object if written to the bitmap memory; for each affected portion: updating the type of data field of the meta-data structure associated with the affected portion to indicate that the type of data is a “compact” type or a “non-compact” type based on the data object and based on the current type of data; updating the data indicator field of the meta-data structure to represent the data object when the type of data field is updated to indicate a “compact” type of data; and writing a corresponding portion of the data object into the affected portion of the bitmap memory when the type of data field is updated to indicate a “non-compact” type of data; and for each meta-data structure: determining if the meta-data structure indicates a “non-compact” type of data; responsive to a determination that the meta-structure indicates a “non-compact” type of data, generating compressed data of the compressed bitmap from data in the corresponding portion of the bitmap memory; and responsive to a determination that the meta-data structure does not indicate a “non-compact” type of data, generating compressed data of the compressed bitmap based on the data indicator field of the meta-data structure.