Plain text print speed thru lpr vs. BBEdit

When I send a plain text file to the Unix lpr command, it prints slowly; when I print with, say, BBEdit, the same text comes out much faster.
I'm using an iBook G3 600 MHz with USB 1.0, OS X 10.4.11, and
an Epson Stylus CX6000--a recent, non-Postscript inkjet printer with recent driver from Epson.
Example: a one-page, 897-byte file. Counting from the time the paper starts to move:
lpr: 120 sec (7.5 characters per second, slower than a teletype)
enscript: 90 sec
BBEdit: 20 sec
(To top it off lpr uses an awful 14-point narrow font...but I already can print slowly in a better font.)
It doesn't seem to be simply a matter of communication speed. Printing through lpr, the print head is constantly moving, but the paper advances very slowly, as if by scan lines. Printing from BBEdit, the paper advances like an inch at a time.
My guess is that BBEdit gives the text to the printer driver which basically sends it on as text to the printer, which has a fast way to print text, while lpr goes through a postscript/bitmap process. In fact lpr is slower than enscript, which explicitly converts to postscript (which has to be rendered in the computer) before printing. (The lpr/enscript speed difference may be because lpr uses a bigger default font.)
So: how can I access that fast text printing ability from Unix? Is there some sample Unix-style C source code out there that calls the same API that BBEdit is calling, that would be easy to adapt to printing text from a file or stdin?
Or, an option or utility already in Mac OS X? A third-party utility that's already out there?
--Steve
P.S. Camino printing the edit page for this post (multiple fonts, boxes, sidebar, etc.): 28 sec. Also, inch-at-a-time.

YES!!
The BBEdit command line tool was apparently introduced in version 6.5, which is the version I have. In the BBEdit folder (the folder BBEdit.app is in) there is a "BBEdit Extras" folder with a "BBEdit Unix Tools Installer.dmg".
Once installed there's a Unix command "bbedit", and you can do "man bbedit".
Besides -p for print there's -b for background, so you never even see anything happen on the screen.
It prints with the defaults set in BBEdit's preferences. I like Courier 10.
I do appreciate enscript. That's what I meant when I said I already knew how to print nice fonts slowly. Also, 2-up is nice, I have my own script for it!
Thanks a lot, etresoft!
--Steve

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