Digital apparatus for generating video characters with various kinds of edging is disclosed. The apparatus employs a plurality of digital delay registers which are used to generate a replica of the video information which is delayed by a preselected number of scan lines. The video information together with the delayed signals produced by the delay registers are provided to a pair of shift registers which generate fixed background patterns depending on the kind of edge information which is selected and a character body signal. The background pattern and the character body signal are then combined to produce the final video character output.

An integrable circuit arrangement for deriving a coincidence pulse on coincidences of the falling edges of pulses of a digital data signal with the falling edges of pulses of sampling signals obtained by frequency division and gating and intended for use in a digital data processing system is disclosed which requires little area on an integrated-circuit chip. It contains an input gate consisting of a first NOR gate and a second NOR gate which are cross-coupled. The sampling signal is applied to the first input of the second NOR gate, and one of the system clock signals to the first input of the first NOR gate. The first input of a third NOR gate is connected via an inverter to the output of the first NOR gate, while the data signal is applied directly to the second input of the third NOR gate, and the delayed data signal is applied to the third input in inverted form.

A device for providing various kinds of video edge information for character video is disclosed. The all-digital device employs a plurality of scan-line length shift registers which function as delay means. The shift registers are series-connected and receive the digital video information. The outputs of the shift registers and the "present" video information are supplied to short-duration delay devices, e.g. 4 bit shift registers. By appropriately combining the outputs of the short-duration delay devices, a character video and an edge signal are produced. Digital inputs and appropriate gating means can produce a variety of enhanced character fonts.

A printing device comprising a character generator storing items of character data, each constituted by a plurality of printing dot data, a first memory for storing the character data read out from the character generator, a printer, and a control unit for driving the printer such that the printer prints the characters represented by the character data, accentuating the outline portions of each character. The printing device further comprises a second memory. The control unit derives, from the character data stored in the first memory, outline-image data representing the outline portions of the characters represented by the character data, and writes the outline-image data into the second memory. It drives the printer in accordance with the character data stored in the first memory and also with the outline-image data stored in the second memory, thereby printing, with a first printing energy, those dots specified by both the character data and the outline-image data, and printing, with a second printing energy, less than the first printing energy, those dots specified by the outline-image data.

An image display control apparatus which can achieve multicolor display for each font. It includes a first memory for storing red, green and blue pattern codes forming an image pattern, a second memory in which bitmap type image pattern data corresponding to the pattern codes have been stored, first, second and third buffers for temporarily storing the image pattern data, first, second and third serial output circuits for serially outputting data delivered from the first, second and third buffers, and a display control circuit for controlling such that the red, green and blue image pattern data are sequentially stored in the first, second and third buffers.