An apparatus (10) for processing documents each represented by a document description (12) encoded in a page description language supportive of reusable data includes a page description language interpreter (14) that receives the document description (12) and parses the document description (12) into document components. An imager (16), communicating with the interpreter (14), creates image representations of received document components. A reusable document component repository (32) stores image representations derived from a plurality of processed documents. The reusable document component repository (32) communicates with the interpreter (14) and the imager (16) to supply those ones of the image representations corresponding to selected document components of the processed documents and to receive selected image representations created by the imager (16) during the processing of documents.