I just tried this and while it worked, it was very slow. It takes a minute to start printing a page in a PDF, meanwhile nc is still hanging and sending the data, seemingly very slowly. The printer is constantly showing "Receiving Data" on its screen. The PDF is only 450KB.
Edit: It took about 5 mins to print a 3-page document, with long pauses between each page.
I suspect it's the printer doing the pdf->ps conversion. I have a beefy printer, so only run into this for large documents. But I'll cat through `gs` then to `nc` to do the pdf->ps conversion locally, and it is much faster.
That makes sense. That's why you want to do print spooling on client devices, which run on extremely fast CPUs in comparison. I guess that is why we don't send documents directly to printers.
Edit: It took about 5 mins to print a 3-page document, with long pauses between each page.