FACSIMILE EQUIPMENT

PURPOSE:To attain communication without limiting an opposite party by giving both the processing means of a sequential encoding system and a hierarchical encoding system. CONSTITUTION:Information to show by what communication system the equipment of an opposite party side can communicate is obtained by a procedure signal (pre-procedure) at the beginning, and the communication system is determined. Namely, if the equipment of the opposite party side can communicate by only the sequential encoding system (G3 system) to encode data sequentially for every traditional normalized line such as MH, MR, MMR, etc., the data obtained by a reading part 3 is encoded and sent by a sequential encoding processing part 8. Besides, if the equipment of the opposite party side is the equipment which can communicate by only the hierarchical encoding system (JBIG system) to encode the data hierarchically or by both the systems, the data obtained by the reading part 3 is encoded and sent by a hierarchical encoding processing part 7.