JPH07212548A - Facsimile equipment - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE:To execute transmission processing directly from a portable storage medium such as a floppy disk stored with document data generated by a wordprocessor and the like. CONSTITUTION:Character code data stored in the floppy disk is read through a floppy disk drive 2, developed into a bit pattern by a character pattern generation circuit 3, converted into picture data and stored in a picture memory 5. Picture data is converted into facsimile data by an encoder circuit 8 in accordance with the operation of an operator. Facsimile data is transmitted to the facsimile equipment of a transmission opposite party via MODEM 10, NCU 11 and a telephone line.

Description

Detailed Description of the Invention

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to a facsimile machine.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art A conventional facsimile apparatus requires a recording system for recording on paper for transmitting and receiving a document and an optical reading system for reading a transmitted document. On the other hand, as described in JP-A-3-220856, there is a method of displaying an image on a home TV receiver or the like instead of recording on paper, and the received document is displayed once on the screen. By checking the contents, it was intended to avoid printing out unnecessary documents. In addition, JP-A-4-16887
In Japanese Patent Publication No. 3, the received data is recorded in a portable storage medium to improve the portability and handleability of the received data.

[0003]

In the conventional facsimile apparatus, an optical reading system is used for inputting a document to be transmitted, or a document once received through a telephone line is used as facsimile data and is portable as a floppy disk or the like. There was no choice but to record it in a storage medium and send it as it was. Therefore, when sending a document created by a word processor or the like, it was necessary to print it out on paper once, input it to a facsimile apparatus by an optical reading system, and send it. Further, the received data is image data composed of a set of pixels, and even if the received data is recorded in a portable storage medium, the data cannot be read by a word processor or the like and reused as document data. It was

It is an object of the present invention to transmit document data, which is created by a word processor or the like and is composed of character codes such as character codes, as facsimile data directly to a destination facsimile machine through a portable storage medium, or to receive received facsimile data. Document data consisting of character codes is recorded in a portable storage medium and can be used by a word processor or the like.

[0005]

[Means for Solving the Problems]

(1) In a facsimile apparatus having means for transmitting / receiving a facsimile signal and image display means for displaying the screen after decoding the received facsimile data, a portable storage medium reading / writing device and a character code are used. Document data including a character pattern generation data storage circuit that stores conversion data for generating image data, and a character pattern generation device that converts a character code into image data, and is composed of character codes recorded in a portable storage medium The above object is achieved by converting the image data into image data, displaying the image data on the screen, or encoding and transmitting the image data.

(2) In the facsimile apparatus described in (1), the image data obtained by decoding the received facsimile data is converted into the character code of the corresponding character for the character portion of the image. The above object is achieved by including a character recognition device for performing the above, converting the received image data into document data including a set of character codes, and recording the document data in a portable storage medium.

(3) The facsimile apparatus described in (1) includes an optical reading device for inputting image data and an image data storage device for recording the input image data, and displays the input image data on the screen. Then, the above object is achieved by transmitting after further encoding or recording in a portable storage medium.

[0008]

A facsimile signal in the G3 standard, which is a standard of general facsimile machines, takes out image data consisting of a set of pixels for each column of pixels, and the data is encoded by an algorithm called the MH method. There is. When printing the received facsimile data on the recording paper, after decoding in the reverse order of the encoding, printing is performed by a recording device such as a thermal recording for each pixel row. In the present invention, the document data consisting of the character code recorded in the portable storage medium is read into the character pattern generation device for each line of the document, and then the character pattern for each character code stored in the character pattern generation data storage circuit is read. Image data for one line of the read document is generated from the pixel pattern. After the conversion of the image data of all the documents or the conversion of the image data for one line of the document, the sequential encoding is performed, and the facsimile data is transmitted to the facsimile apparatus of the transmission destination. As a result, it becomes possible to directly transmit the document data created by a word processor or the like to a portable storage medium such as a floppy disk without printing it on paper.

With respect to the image data obtained by decoding the received facsimile data, the character portion of the image is converted into the corresponding character code by the character recognition device, and the document data composed of these character codes is portable. By storing it in the storage medium, it becomes possible to reuse the received facsimile data as document data in a word processor or the like.

[0010]

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS A first embodiment of the present invention will be described with reference to FIGS. 1 and 2. FIG. 1 shows the configuration of the apparatus, and the operation of the apparatus will be described below with reference to the drawing. First, of the document data created by a word processor, a personal computer or the like stored in the floppy disk 1, the character code for one line of the document is read by the CPU 1 through the floppy disk drive 2,
As shown in FIG. 2, the bit pattern of each character stored in the CG-ROM 4 is converted by the character pattern generation circuit 3 into a black and white binary 16 × 16 dot bit pattern corresponding to each character code. The document data converted into a bit pattern by the character pattern generation circuit 3 is
It is stored in the image memory 5 as image data. The image data stored in the image memory 5 is sent to the CRT display 7 via the image display circuit 6 according to the operation of the operator of the apparatus.
Is displayed in. At this time, in the present embodiment, the display of the CRT display 7 is 8 lines per screen in accordance with the A4 size paper when transmitting by the facsimile of G3 standard.
64 dots (54 characters), 1140 lines (character 71
Line)). The reason for the above setting is that when printing on A4 size recording paper in a G3 standard facsimile, one line is composed of 1724 pixels. This is because one dot of the pattern is set. Since the margin portion of the paper is not taken into consideration in this setting, when inserting the margin, it is necessary to configure the image data so that the number of dots in one line is 864 dots or less and both sides of the paper are blank. . The displayed image data is converted into facsimile data by the encoding circuit 8, and the modem 1
0, NCU 11 transmits the data via the telephone line 12 to the facsimile apparatus of the transmission destination. When facsimile data is received via the telephone line 12, the facsimile data is converted into image data by the decoding circuit 9 and stored in the image memory 5. The data stored in the image memory 5 is displayed on the CRT display 7 by the image display circuit 6 according to the operation of the operator. According to the present embodiment, when a document created by a word processor or the like is transmitted by a facsimile device, it is not necessary to print the document once on paper as in the case of the conventional facsimile transmission, but it is more convenient to carry. Since it becomes possible to perform facsimile transmission from the disk, the operation becomes easy when a large amount of documents must be transmitted.
By displaying the transmitted document on the CRT display immediately before the transmission, the contents can be confirmed before the transmission. Although the floppy disk device is used as the portable storage medium in this embodiment, a magneto-optical disk device, a magnetic tape device, or the like can be used as the portable storage medium to use it as a larger-capacity storage medium.

Next, a second embodiment of the present invention will be described with reference to FIG. In this embodiment, as shown in the figure, a character recognition circuit 13 is provided in addition to the first embodiment, and it has a function of converting the received facsimile image data into a character string. In this embodiment, the data received via the telephone line 12 is converted into image data by the decoding circuit 9 and stored in the image memory as in the first embodiment. Next, the image data in the image memory is displayed by the image display circuit 6 as C.
Displayed on the RT display 7, the character recognition circuit 13 performs conversion processing into character code data according to the operation of the operator. In the character recognition circuit 13 in the figure, first, a character portion is extracted from the image data stored in the image memory 5, and it is divided into individual character blocks.
Then, pattern matching processing is performed on each character portion to determine the corresponding character. The part that was not recognized as a character, that is, the part where the corresponding character could not be determined is left as image data, and finally this image data and the character string data converted from the image data are recorded on a floppy disk. To be done. According to the present embodiment, the received facsimile data can be edited as document data by a word processor or the like.

A third embodiment of the present invention will be described with reference to FIG. The present embodiment is different from the first embodiment in that it is provided with an interface circuit 14 for connecting to a scanner for image reading and a printer, respectively, and a detachable connection terminal 15.
By connecting the scanner 16 and the printer 17 via the printer, it has a function of reading and transmitting image data from paper, a notebook, or the like, or printing the received facsimile data by the printer. First, when transmitting a document, image data is optically read by the scanner 16 and stored in the image memory 5. Then, the contents of the image memory 5 are displayed on the CRT display 7 via the image display circuit 6 or converted into facsimile data by the encoding circuit 8 according to the operation of the operator, and then the modem 1
0, NCU 11, and telephone line 12 perform transmission processing to the facsimile apparatus of the transmission destination. On the other hand, when the facsimile data is received, it is converted into image data by the decoding circuit 9 and stored in the image memory. Further, the image data stored in the memory is displayed on a CRT display, printed by the printer 17, or recorded as image data on a floppy disk. According to this embodiment, the reading source of the transmission original and the recording means of the reception original can be arbitrarily selected, and the scanner 16 and the printer 17 can be attached / detached so that the facsimile apparatus main body can be downsized.

[0013]

According to the present invention, in a facsimile apparatus having an image display function of received data, it is possible to directly read and transmit data consisting of character code information created by a word processor or the like during transmission. An optical data reading system is not required, and since it is not necessary to print data from a word processor or the like once, and then read and transmit the data, it is possible to simplify the operation. Further, since it has a function of converting the received facsimile data into a character code, it becomes possible to edit the received data as document data by a word processor or the like.

[Brief description of drawings]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a first embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 2 is a functional explanatory diagram according to the first embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 3 is a block diagram of a second embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 4 is a block diagram of a third embodiment of the present invention.

[Explanation of symbols]

1 ... CPU, 2 ... Floppy disk drive, 3 ... Character pattern generation circuit, 4 ... CG-ROM, 5 ... Image memory, 6 ... Image display circuit, 7 ... CRT display, 8 ...
Encoding circuit, 9 ... Decoding circuit, 10 ... Modem, 11 ... N
CU, 12 ... Telephone line.

 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────── ─── Continuation of the front page (72) Inventor Kazuyasu Sato 502 Jinritsucho, Tsuchiura-shi, Ibaraki Machinery Research Institute, Hiritsu Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (72) Inventor Motoo Oga 1410 Inada, Katsuta-shi, Ibaraki Hitachi Ltd. Information & Video Media Business Unit (72) Inventor Akira Shimizu 1410 Inada, Katsuta City, Ibaraki Prefecture Hitachi, Ltd. Information & Video Media Business Unit

Claims (3)

[Claims] 1. A facsimile apparatus having means for transmitting / receiving a facsimile signal and image display means for displaying on a screen after decoding received facsimile data, a reading / writing apparatus for a portable storage medium, and a character. The character code stored in the portable storage medium, comprising a character pattern storage circuit for storing conversion data for generating image data from a code, and a character pattern generation device for converting the character code into the image data. A facsimile apparatus having a function of converting document data consisting of (1) into image data and then displaying on the screen or encoding and then transmitting. 2. The image data obtained by decoding the received facsimile data according to claim 1,
A character recognizing device for converting a character indicating a character of the image into a character code of the corresponding character is provided, and the received image data is converted into document data composed of a set of the character codes, which is stored in a portable storage. A facsimile machine having a function of recording on a medium. 3. The screen according to claim 1, further comprising an optical reading device for inputting the image data and an interface device for connecting to a recording device for recording an image on a recording sheet. A facsimile device having a function of displaying on the screen, further encoding, transmitting, or recording on the portable storage medium, and printing the received image on a recording paper.