Methods and apparatus for using meta-data structures to represent portions of a bitmap memory when generating the sheetside image and when generating a compressed representation of the sheetside image. A table of meta-data structures is maintained with each structure corresponding to a portion of the bitmap memory. Data objects representing a sheetside image are processed by determining which portions the data object would affect, by updating the meta-data structures corresponding to affected portions to indicate whether the affect generates a “compact” type of data or a “non-compact” type of data, and for the “non-compact” types of data writing data to the bitmap memory. For portions having “compact” type of data, the corresponding meta-data structures alone describes the bitmap portion of data. A compressed-bitmap generator then uses the meta-data structures and the portions of the bitmap memory containing “non-compact” data to generate a compressed representation of the sheetside image.