Patent ID: 6896427

Claim:
An automatic printer comprising: a conveying device for intermittently conveying a print medium to a predetermined place; a moving device provided above the predetermined place and having a carriage that is moved thereby in an arbitrary direction; printing means having an ink jet section mounted on the carriage, for printing a pattern onto the print medium; an image pickup device mounted on the carriage, for picking up the image of a pattern printed on the print medium in the predetermined place; and a controller for controlling the conveying device, moving device, printing means, and image pickup device, wherein the controller performs control operations comprising: allocating pattern data longer than the effective printing region in the predetermined place to a plurality of regions; printing a portion of the pattern onto a preceding allocated region by the printing means; picking up images of the pattern portions including, in the printed pattern, the boundary between the pattern already printed and a portion to be next printed in the conveying direction of the print medium, and the boundary between the printed portion and the non-printed portion in the width direction of the print medium; forwarding, after the image pickup, the printed region portion from the effective printing region in order to position a next allocated region in the effective region; again picking up the pattern portion of which the image has been picked up by an image pickup device; mutually comparing the images of the respective patterns picked up before and after the forwarding; performing, when said two images are deviated from each other, an arithmetic correction so that said two images coincide with each other; correcting reference pattern print data with respect to the image position of the precedently printed pattern; and performing a printing operation in a state where the joint position of the pattern precedently printed and that of a pattern to be next printed are conformed to each other.