A FONT SHARING SYSTEM IN WHICH DATA REPRESENTING A CHARACTER STRING CAN BE COMMUNICATED BETWEEN A CLIENT COMPUTER AND A SERVER WHEREIN ONLY LAYOUT FRAMES ARE DISPLAYED IN A PREVIEW AREA OF A DISPLAY SCREEN

A client computer and a server share fonts in an efficient manner. The client computer and server are capable of communicating data with each other. Character specifying data for specifying a character and a font ID for specifying the font of this character are stored in a layout information file and transmitted from the client computer to the server. On the basis of a layout information file, the server retrieves character image data (a bitmap text file) expressing the character as an image. The server transmits the found character image data to the client computer. When character image data cannot be found, the character image data is generated and is then transmitted from the server to the client computer.