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geekery
in the end, the printer failed and started to throw ink-poo all over sheets of paper, so we sent the pdf to printshop nearby
geekery
... the crucial part was
-paper A4 -expand
options to pdftops command.
after that i was able to print using pretty much this kind of command
cat FILE.ps | lp -d "printername"
(obtain printername with lpstat -p -d)
the most cpu intense process was pdftops.
in any case, FUN TIMEZ WITH UNIXEZ
huge thanks to people on stackexchange and other forums leaving helpful tricks laying around.
geekery
essentially, the 'document viewer' was unable to print a pdf - albeit 7Mb big, 250pages - it just died after few pages. i'm not sure what went wrong there, but I tried on another computer, converted pdf to postscript (700Mb) and then tried to print it using commandline tools. the biggest problem was scale-to-page which just didn't work whatever I did. at the end I realised that pdf->ps conversion already created A4 pages with smaller page on them without scaling. so...