PURPOSE: To make it possible to store a large amount of character patterns, by repeatedly reading in a soft mode and printing the dots of an extended part stored in the space region part of the character pattern corresponding to set character intervals.

CONSTITUTION: A mapping processor 43 reads a character intervals S stored in page buffer 41 and reads dot patterns corresponding to an arbitrary one line from a first W a N-th lines in a space region to transfer the same to buffer 45 while printing corresponding to one line is performed by a recording head 14 to repeat printing while reducing only one from S. When S=0, (i) is set to 1 and the dot pattern of a first line is read to perform printing corresponding to one line by the buffer 45 and the head 14. In the next step, when 1 is added to (i) and printing is performed in M-times of recirculations, printing corresponding to one line is finished. By this method, a pattern to be continued can be printed in a perfectly continuous state and necessary memory capacity can be reduced and, if it is of the same capacity, a large amount of character patterns can be stored.