This invention provides an ink jet printing method which ejects different kinds of ink from print heads onto a print medium to form an image according to print data transferred from a predetermined print data source and which can deal with both a normal print data transfer mode and an offset transfer mode. This printing method discriminates the data transfer mode of the print data transferred from the predetermined print data source and sets, in each of the print heads independently, positions of those of the plurality of nozzles that are to be used for printing. Then, the printing method controls the positions of the nozzles to be used according to the data transfer mode discriminated.