A system and method for page composition in a processor-controlled printing system. Formatted image data is first received to a processor, the data representing image elements to be merged into a new document. At least one compressed cell describing each of the page elements is generated based on the formatted image data. A compressed cell contains pixilated image data of a predetermined pixel size. An element table including at least one cell pointer for each page element is generated. Each cell pointer includes a memory location and a cell type for each compressed cell that is pointed to by the generated element table. A merged page is composed based on the cell type entries of the element tables. A page composition system and a computer readable media having computer instructions for implementing the method of page composition are also provided.