To follow up my own question...

First of all, thanks to all who sent helpful suggestions. It turned
out that the easiest solution was that (at least) some JetDirect cards
or boxes seem to support the LPR/LPD protocol, so I was able to use
one of our local LaserJet printers for my experiment. This was even
easier than downloading some of the shareware or trial programs (or
learning how to configure LPD on Linux ;-)

I downloaded two Java based LPR utilities found via Google...

 http://www.hemasoft.de/dev/lprj/       (~ 49 KB)
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/jlpr/  (~ 21 KB)

Both offered LPR client libraries for sending printouts to LPD
print servers programmatically. The former included a little GUI
example program, the latter a command line example program, which
was more appropriate for being run on MPE/iX itself ;-)

 :chdir ./jlpr
 :setvar classpath, "lpr.jar"
 :java lpr myPrinter.hp.com pr1 myFile.txt
 Printed
 :# walk over to pick up the printout :-)

Java LPR only sends the raw binary data, similar to what the
smbclient utility does for Windows based printers, i.e. no use
for MPE/iX spoolfiles with carriage control (CCTL) information
inside. (=> still good value in the 3rd party tools)

However, Java/iX gave LPR client to MPE without any porting.

Lars.

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