I have a humble Brother HL-1110 monochrome laser printer with 1MB of RAM. That's pretty short and, in the beginning, I thought I was only going to be able to print plain text documents or small PDF documents because laser printers need to store the entire page in their memory before they actually print it.
But, for some reason, this doesn't seem to be the case. Many of my prints are well above 1MB, and some are at around 40MB per page (at least that's what CUPS claims to be the case).
I'm very glad I can print large documents but I'm also confused. Presumably, my printer should run out of memory; but it doesn't. Why is that?