Disclosed is a printing apparatus in which printing elements used in the printing of each raster can be set at will. The printing apparatus has a carriage equipped with a printhead having a plurality of printing elements arranged in a predetermined direction, and the carriage is made to scan across a printing medium in a direction that intersects the direction in which the printing elements are arranged, thereby performing printing on the medium. The printing elements are divided into a plurality of blocks each consisting of a predetermined number of successive printing elements, print data that has been transmitted in raster form is stored in a receive buffer, and data that has been stored in the receive buffer is divided and stored in a print buffer having a plurality of areas corresponding to the blocks of printing elements. In accordance with printing elements used in a scan, the data in a corresponding area of the print buffer is shifted and the areas of the print buffer and respective ones of the blocks are made to correspond in accordance with distance over which the printing medium is transported after a scan is performed. The amount of shift is then calculated.