A printing apparatus has high reliability both in manual feeding and in automatic feeding of a printing medium, and a feeding control method controls the printing apparatus. In the case of manual feeding of a sheet as the printing medium, the sheet is transported by an LF roller for an amount sufficient for feeding the tip end of the sheet to a discharge paper sensor located on the downstream side of a paper path with respect to a printing head. Judgment whether paper feeding is successful or not is made depending on whether the sheet is detected by the discharged paper sensor. On the other hand, in the case of automatic feeding using an automatic feeding apparatus, the operation of transporting the sheet to the discharged paper sensor is not performed. By this, in the case of automatic feeding, it becomes unnecessary to backwardly feed the sheet before initiation of printing so that the rotation amount of the LF roller is minimized.