A high-speed printer includes a prerecorded compressed font stored, for example, in holographic form. The constituent parts (for example, bars) of a set of characters to be printed are stored in the hologram. By means of acousto-optic deflection techniques, an incident light beam is directed to illuminate simultaneously the plural areas of the hologram which store the constituent parts of a character selected to be printed. In turn, representations of the parts stored in the illuminated areas are imaged onto a suitable recording medium where recombination and printing of the selected character take place.