In recent years, along with popularization of computers and prevalence of networked environments of information, e-mail messages that exchange text information via networks have prevailed.
E-mail allows to attach files of various formats as “attached files” to a “text of e-mail” that includes mail text as text information, and a mail header that describes various kinds of control information. For example, by exploiting Internet FAX (to be abbreviated as “IFAX” hereinafter), images can be exchanged by attaching a TIFF (Tag Image File Format) format file.
More specifically, a sender converts an image, which is scanned by a scanner, into a TIFF format, and sends it as an attached file of e-mail. A receiver receives the e-mail, and reproduces and prints the attached TIFF file, thus implementing exchange of the image between the sender and receiver.
Recently, a technique for, upon sending a document which includes handwritten text and an image together via e-mail, not only sending an image scanned by a scanner as an attached file, but also extracting text information by applying an OCR to the scanned image, and embedding the extracted text information in a text of e-mail when it is sent has been proposed (e.g., see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-306105).
Furthermore, the IFAX is literally used in the Internet environments, and is increasingly used in international environments. Hence, character codes do not match between a sender and receiver, and when received e-mail is displayed, garble often occurs in the text of e-mail. In order to solve such problem, a technique for switching a character code and font on the basis of a character string at the end of an e-mail address has been proposed (e.g., see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-184778).
However, as described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-306105, when e-mail is created by embedding text information extracted by the OCR into the text of e-mail, some documents scanned by the scanner may often be garbled. For example, when e-mail is created by inputting Japanese text information to a text of e-mail, and embedding Korean text information, which is extracted by scanning a document written in Korean using the scanner and applying the OCR, into the text of e-mail written in Japanese (i.e., when the single text of e-mail includes text information described in character codes of different kinds of language), the receiver side that received that e-mail displays garbled Korean text information since the character code does not match.
That is, when e-mail is normally created by inputting Japanese text information to a text of e-mail, and embedding Japanese text information, which is extracted by scanning a document written in Japanese using the scanner and applying the OCR, into the text of e-mail, since the identical character code is used, no problem of garble is posed. However, when text information used in documents becomes diversified based on pervasion of current globalization, and languages such as Chinese, Korean, and the like are increasingly used daily, such problem of garble becomes obvious.
On the other hand, the problem of garble has been discussed in, e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-184778, this reference targets at a case wherein character codes of the sender and receiver do not match, and cannot be applied to a case wherein the text of e-mail includes text information of different character codes.
Furthermore, the problem of garble may be caused not only by the process on the sender side but also that on the receiver side. For example, a system which stores a received e-mail message in a mail box in a mail server, and in which a communication apparatus creates a notification e-mail message using text information of a text of the received e-mail message, and text information used to notify the receiver that the e-mail message is stored in the mail box (text information appended by the communication apparatus), and sends the created notification e-mail message to the receiver will be exemplified below.
In such system, when the communication apparatus creates a notification e-mail message, and the kind of language of a character code of text information included in the text of the received e-mail message is different from that of a character code of text information (which is used to notify the receiver that the e-mail message is stored in the mail box) to be appended by the communication apparatus, the notification e-mail message to be created includes text information described in text codes of different kinds of language, and the receiver that receives the created notification e-mail message displays garbled contents due to mismatch of the character codes.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds