PURPOSE: To prepare an excellent document in appearance by unifying the size of characters, the space between characters and the space between lines when these are different when plural documents are read.

CONSTITUTION: An operator edits plural documents read from a scanner 401, looking at a CRT 405 and using a pointing device 406. At this time, when it is necessary to unify the size of characters and the space between characters, etc., in a sentence, the effect is instructed by a message area. Then, the size of characters, the space between characters and the space between lines in a sentence to be a reference are scanned and a discrimination is performed. Similarly, each value also in other sentence is discriminated, variable power is performed based on this value and a layout is performed. Thus, a sentence with a unified feeling can be prepared. As each value of these is stored in a RAM 409 and the values can be utilized at the time of the next work, it is unnecessary to again determine the data of the size of characters, etc., in a sentence to be processed and a processing speed can be improved.