A method and system for compressing bitmap data in a system for sharing an application
running on a host computer with a remote computer, wherein the shared application's
screen output is simultaneously displayed on both computers. Simultaneous display
of screen output is achieved by efficiently transmitting display data between the
host computer and the remote computer. When a font used by the host computer for
displaying text is not available on the remote computer, the host computer sends
a bitmap representation of the text for display, rather than the text itself. Bitmap
representations are cached by the remote computer, so that the same bitmap representation
need not be repeatedly transmitted from the host computer to the remote computer.
Bitmap representations are compressed by the host computer prior to transmission,
transmitted, then decompressed by the remote computer.
