Patent ID: 7898682

Claim:
A printing apparatus comprising: one or more print processing sections that execute a printing process of printing an image represented by input printing image data onto a recording medium; a plurality of data processing sections that execute a generating process of generating the printing image data to be input to the print processing section based on input data for a print subject; and a control unit that inputs in a distributed manner the data for the print subject corresponding to a single printing job to the plurality of data processing sections with the plurality of data processing sections executing in parallel the generating process for assigned parts of the data for the print subject corresponding to the single printing job, wherein the data for the print subject corresponds to collated data of a plurality of pages of page data that describe an image to be printed on a single page of the recording medium, and the control unit forecasts a printing processing time of the generating process for the data for the print subject for each of the plurality of pages of page data, determines if a proportion of the number of pages of page data in which the forecasted printing processing time of the generating process is larger than a first predetermined value with respect to a total number of pages of the print data is larger than a second predetermined value, selects inputting in a distributed manner the data for a print subject corresponding to the single printing job to the plurality of data processing sections in a case where the proportion is determined to be larger than the second predetermined value, and selects inputting the data for a print subject corresponding to the single printing job to only a specific data processing section in a case where the proportion is determined to be equal to or less than the second predetermined value, and executes the inputting of the data for a print subject to the data processing section in accordance with a result of the selection.