Printer and printing therefor

A printing apparatus that drives a print head to form a raster line, which comprises an array of dots arranged in one direction in a printing medium, and carries out a sub-scan, which feeds said printing medium relative to said print head in another direction that crosses the raster line whenever the raster line is formed, thereby printing an image, said printing apparatus comprising:

• a dot-forming element array that is mounted on said print head and comprises N dot-forming elements (where N is a positive integer greater than 4) for creating dots on said printing medium, said N dot-forming elements being arranged at a k dot pitch, which corresponds to a minimum pitch between dots created on said printing medium, in the subs-canning direction;
• a print head driving unit that drives said print head and causes required dot-forming elements in said dot-forming element array to create dots on said printing medium;
• a sub-scan control unit that carries out the feed of said printing medium in the sub-scanning direction after each pass of raster creation, which drives said print head driving unit to form at least part of the raster line;
• and
• a dot creation control unit that selects n dot-forming elements (where n is a positive integer of less than N) among said dot-forming element array, makes a set of at least two dot-forming elements out of said selected dot-forming elements, and causes a raster line to be formed on said printing medium in each pass, said dot creation control unit causing a remaining dot-forming element other than said n dot-forming elements selected among said dot-forming element array and said made set of said dot-forming elements to create a dot adjoining to two dots, which are created by two passes having a significant time interval.