Patent ID: 7207643

Claim:
An image forming apparatus comprising: a recording head unit in which a plurality of recording heads are arranged in substantially the same direction as an arranging direction of recording elements such that an overlapped region is formed between the heads; a detector which detects a width of the overlapped region of each of said plurality of recording heads from a predetermined test chart printed using the recording head unit; a line image determinator which determines whether or not image data corresponding to the overlapped region between the heads is a line image; and an image data distributor which distributes image data input to each of said plurality of recording heads, in accordance with the detected width of the overlapped region between the heads; wherein if the image data corresponding to the overlapped region between the heads is found to be a line image by the image data determinator, the image data distributor distributes the image data so that no complementary printing is performed in the overlapped region.