| 摘要 |
PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a thermal transfer printing method and a thermal transfer printer enabling the printing of an excellent multi-gradation image and binary-gradation image in the condition that the friction between a printing medium and an ink ribbon becomes uniform due to a printing energy being applied to the whole printable region and the conveying distance of the printing medium in the conveyance direction dose not vary.SOLUTION: The thermal transfer printing method is applied to the printing of the multi-gradation image and binary-gradation image by way of selectively heating and driving each heating element of a thermal head and performing the thermal transfer of ink of the ink ribbon to the printing medium. In the thermal transfer printing method, a non-image region which is neither the multi-gradation image region nor the binary-gradation image region is distinguished for the printing data developed into bit map data, and the distinguished data of the non-image region is converted into the new bit map data by way of replacing the same distinguished data with a predetermined value with which the ink of the ink ribbon is hardly transferred even if actually printed, and then the drive control of each heating element of the thermal head is performed based on the new converted bit map data. |
