COMPLEX CHARACTER GENERATOR UTILIZING BYTE SCANNING

A character compaction and generation method and apparatus which is particularly adapted to the compaction and generation of complex characters such as Kanji characters. Each character in a complex character set is defined by an I row and J column dot matrix, wherein each row is comprised of J bytes. Each successive row of a given character is scanned from the first through the Jth byte to determine if the current byte being scanned has the same numerical value as the immediately preceding or directly above byte in the scanning sequence. The number of successively read out sequence of bytes that have the same numerical value as the immediately preceding or directly above byte are coded as single symbols words Pn and Am, respectively, where n and m are integers which are indicative of the number of successive bytes scanned in sequence which are equal in numerical value to each immediately preceding or directly above byte. If a current byte being scanned is not of the same numerical value as the previous byte or the above byte, it is coded as a single symbol Sx, where x is an integer which is indicative of its numerical value. Each of the successively generated symbols Pn, Am and Sx for a given complex character are stored as a compacted complex representation thereof.