IMAGE FORMING APPARATUS AND METHOD

In changing or otherwise handling sequential videotex codes composed of geometric codes representing individual image areas as respective geometric drawings and also characteristic codes representing attributes of the geometric drawings, the order of transmission of the geometric codes and characteristic codes is supervised on an order table and a characteristic code table is provided for supervising the characteristic codes, with correction or rearranging of the videotex code data being effected on these tables. In the case where the videotex codes are to represent an input color image, a histogram of the frequencies of occurrence of all colors represented by color data for each input color image is produced and a predetermined relatively small number n of colors having the highest frequencies of occurrence, either in the histogram as a whole, or in divisions of the histogram, are selected and each image area has assigned thereto color data representing the one of the n selected colors closest to the actual color of the image area in question.