I sort of regard these commenters as crazy. I never had the habit of printing stuff off so I could read it later. I read it online, or not at all. And by "online" I mean from computer storage on the screen, not necessarily over a modem connection or something.
The fundamental disconnect you guys have is this: in order to print something out, it needs to be stored somewhere first. So you indeed downloaded a text file in order to print it. Surely you saved it somewhere, at least in RAM if not permanent storage. Otherwise the printout wouldn't happen.
The sorts of things that I used the printer for were school reports and papers, and especially Print Shop style banners. It was really fun to run off a larger-than-life "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" sign that was basically professional DTP style with good fonts, graphics and the whole bit.
At school the chief use of the Line Printers was for large-format ASCII art. We'd take some GIFS of rather prurient pin-up shots, or anime or just some interesting subject, and run it through an ASCII art generator, then print out something suitable for covering an entire wall. Sometimes we'd even print out the Pascal code we were working on, so we could mark it up and sort of edit it offline. But that was the exception to prove the rule.