Patent ID: 6871589

Claim:
A hybrid stencil printing apparatus comprising: a stencil-making/printing unit configured to perforate a stencil sheet corresponding to a desired image, to wind the stencil sheet around an outer peripheral surface of a print drum, and to transfer a printing medium to the print drum with pressure, thereby printing the printing medium; an other-method image-formation unit configured to print the printing medium transferred on a same transfer passage as the stencil-making/printing unit according to a different printing method from the stencil-making/printing unit; and an image-formation unit selection-unit configured to input an original digital image, to determine attributes of image portions of the inputted original digital image, and to allocate each image portion selectively to the stencil-making/printing unit and the other-method image-formation unit based on the determination result; wherein the image-formation unit selection-unit determines whether each image portion of the original digital image is a vector or bit-map image, allocates the vector image portions to the stencil-making/printing unit, and allocates the bit-map image portions to the other-method image-formation unit.