Patent ID: 7144167

Claim:
A color printing apparatus comprising: color print means for printing in multi tone levels using at least yellow, magenta, cyan and black printing materials; font storage means for storing font data in advance, wherein the font data corresponds to the yellow, magenta, cyan and black colors has at least different tone levels for respective colors, in correspondence with a character code, and the font data of at least one of yellow, magenta, cyan and black colors is data having the multi tone levels being different from tone level of other font data; development means for reading out the font data stored in said font storage means for respective colors, in correspondence to a code, and storing the font data for each color into a print buffer corresponding to each color; and control means for outputting the font data for each color stored in the print buffer to said color print means and controlling to cause said color print means to print an image corresponding to the code, wherein said font storage means stores font data of colors which can be printed by said color print means, and wherein the font data corresponding to the black color is binary data indicating the presence/absence of a pixel, and a data size of font data corresponding to each of yellow, magenta, and cyan colors is 2 n , with n being a positive integer, times of the data size of the font data corresponding to black color.