Out of curiosity... Have you tried sending the printer output to a file? From this we might be able to get some idea of where it's slowing down. If there isn't much difference in the time to generate the printer output in the different modes, it could indicate that there's something about the printer output that causes the rendering engine to take a long time (I recall ages ago, when I had two different Postscript files that would output essentially the same thing -- one was small, but required the rendering engine to make a lot of computations, and another that was significantly larger, but since everything was pre-computed took much less time to process). If the size of the output is significantly different, it could be indicative of how the text is being rendered (i.e. text could've been rendered as graphic rather than using fonts).