摘要 |
A printing apparatus encodes masks used for thinning out print data when performing multi-pass printing and provided in correspondence with passes, and stores the encoded masks in a memory. The printing apparatus includes an assignment unit that assigns different codes with respect to pixels that indicate dot-on and are held in the masks provided in correspondence with the passes, depending on for which pass of mask processing the masks are used, and an encoding unit that generates, using the different codes, index data indicating pixels that indicate dot-on and are held in the masks corresponding to the passes, and generates encoded data by encoding the index data. Here, the encoding unit determines an assignment relationship in which the different codes are assigned to the passes by the assignment unit such that the encoded data is smaller than the data size of original masks, and generates the encoded data. |