PURPOSE: To perform overlapped printing under simple control, without decreasing a printing speed and increasing the capacity of a pattern memory.

CONSTITUTION: In addition to a character pattern memory 35, a symbol pattern memory 25 is provided and further registers 31 and 32 for indicating storage address of the character pattern memory, registers 23 and 24 for indicating storage addresses of the symbol pattern memory, and character size registers 33 and 34 for indicating the size of a character pattern to be read out are provided. The initial address of print characters is stored in the registers 31 and 32, the initial address of an overstrike printing symbol is set in the registers 23 and 24, and the character matrix size is set in the registers 33 and 34.