DYNAMIC FONT MANAGEMENT FOR LARGE CHARACTER SETS

When a document imaging operation commences, a document is examined to detect each font, and each glyph of a font, appearing in the document. If all of the detected fonts are currently stored in an imaging device, the document is sent to the device. If one or more detected fonts is not stored in the device, the detected glyphs of that font are mapped to a sparse font set. The device is queried to determine whether it can store the sparse font set. If it can, the sparse font set is downloaded to the device. If the device cannot store the sparse font set, the document is converted into a bit-mapped image, which is then imaged.