The invention provides a printer with a capability of printing in any one of a plurality of rotations. Component image data is stored in a library. The component image data is subdivided into data sets or quads (30-33). The size of a quad is selected so that it can be readily rotated with simple hardware. As the data sets are written to a buffer (44), they are rotated, and the locations in the buffer at which the different data sets are written depends oil the selected rotation, to provide for data rotation "on the fly" .