PURPOSE: To obtain natural connections of Japanese brush-written characters such as a semi-cursive and a cursive style of writing in consideration of a 'flow of brush writing between characters'.

CONSTITUTION: The outline and center line of the character are calculated from the control data to obtain center line data and outline data based on control data 2a for generating the outline of a character, control point data 1a for generating a center line indicating the direction of an image (brush) when the character is written, and image data for recognizing the 1st stroke and final stroke of the character. The center line data on a current character final image and center line data on the 1st image of a next character are corrected so that the final image of the current character and the 1st image of the next character are connected by a smooth virtual curve, and the outline control data are also corrected so as to obtain an outline along the corrected center line. The characters are expanded and printed by using the corrected outline control data.