A printer arrangement of the type which prints data serially along a line on a record medium by relative impact of type characters and record medium through a ribbon. Printing is a mixture of stop and go printing, essentially a character at a time, and continuous printing of a plurality of characters. Driving power for the ribbon is derived from carriage movement on which the print head is mounted through controllable clutch and toggle switch action. The toggle switch action reverses ribbon drive direction in response to a depletion of ribbon signal.