Abstract

The present invention discloses a photocopier with an electronic sorting function which can change over to an appropriate control at an occurrence of a memory-full by using a control device to avoid the interference of copying operation as well as minimizing the time required. More precisely, the control unit forcibly changes the number of copies to 1 when the memory-full occurs, thence reads out the data per page for printing out them once and clears them. Thus, the memory restores a free area and the data of the following page are successively written thereinto. By repeating the above readout-clear-writing procedure, the data of all the documents are safely stored in the memory and read out for the printing successively. As a result, a complete set of the documents is copied, albeit one. On the other hand, the control unit cancels the electronic sorting mode, and hence the readout sequence set in advance when the memory-full occurs, and reads out the data from the memory in the same sequence as the documents were read for as many times as the desired number of copies to clear them subsequently and releases it from the memory-full. By cancelling the preset readout sequence, not only the data in the memory can be efficiently utilized, but also as many copies as desired can be made without any inteference during the copying operation.