Data communication system

Abstract

A communication system for communicating a document comprising image data, character code data, and the like has: a receiver to receive the document data; a memory to store the received document data; a designating unit designate the data in the memory; an instructing unit to command the printing of the designated data; a printer to print the designated data on the basis of the instruction by the instructing unit; and a controller for allowing the received document data to be printed by the printer when a failure of the memory is detected even if printing is not commanded by the instructing unit. The failure of the memory may be a lack of memory capacity. The received document data may be output to either the memory or the printer in accordance with signals from the transmission side. This system includes another instructing unit to command the deletion of the designated document data from the memory. With this system, the document data sent from the transmission side can be certainly and promptly received by the reception side and can be printed out as necessary by command of the operator even if the auxiliary memory unit on the reception side is out of order.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.