I think the (slow printing) problem is with your printer....
   DeskJet as well as BubbleJets(from Canon) are notorious for their
   lethargic printing.

   I print my .PDF files on a 486DX100 with 20Mb of RAM on a
   LaserJet 4 (PostScript) and it comes out as fast (almost) as would be with
   a text file.

Yes and no.  PDF is from the same company that developed postscript, and
they have enough similarities that a postscript printer does a fine job
of printing acrobat (PDF.)  For something like a deskjet, I suspect that
the only choice is to build a full page bitmap and download it a byte at
a time to the printer, which would always be slow...

BillW