> Further, printers are very slow at rasterizing, and so while support for PDF rasterization is very common you probably don't want to use it.
That's interesting. Back in the day (of HP LaserJet 4L and similar), I learned that rasterizing on the PC and sending to the printer was very slow because printers had slow connections and little memory. The resolution was also limited and it looked blocky. The rule was to never print "as bitmap" if you could avoid it. OTOH printing "flat" postscript was very fast and yielded much better quality. I think the printers allowed loadable fonts and often had some of the standards (Times, Arial) pre-loaded.
The big issue is that, back when, printed documents were much simpler. Printers offer a set of embedded fonts that makes it very quick and easy to print simple text documents, if you are okay with one of the printer's embedded fonts. You just need to send a couple commands to set up the font parameters and then the text. PCL and moreso Postscript also give you some vector drawing capability that makes printing line art in vector format very efficient.
But the nature of printing has changed! People now want to print things in all kinds of arbitrary fonts, which requires either rasterizing to print resolution (which is a lot, 300-600dpi) or sending the printer all the outlines as vector instructions. Postscript and PCL take different approaches to this and sometimes different print stacks do as well. And then add graphics, and 99% of documents you encounter these days provide all graphics in raster format in the first place. The result is that something, either the host or the printer, needs to take a raster graphic (which can even just be little icons) and interpolate them to whatever dot pitch the printer is using. That tends to be the real killer... that interpolation can take a printer a very long time. Usually there's some way in the PCL (exposed via the printer driver) that you can tell the printer to interpolate to a lower DPI which will speed things up, but make your images look worse.
Unfortunately sending 600dpi graphics over the network can still be kind of slow and does contribute to the "Receiving Data..." and time to first page even with modern printers and drivers. Most laser printers have a pretty poor TTFP anyway, though, so it's not too big of a deal.
That's interesting. Back in the day (of HP LaserJet 4L and similar), I learned that rasterizing on the PC and sending to the printer was very slow because printers had slow connections and little memory. The resolution was also limited and it looked blocky. The rule was to never print "as bitmap" if you could avoid it. OTOH printing "flat" postscript was very fast and yielded much better quality. I think the printers allowed loadable fonts and often had some of the standards (Times, Arial) pre-loaded.