Even if you don't have a printer on your local machine, you can still use lpd to send a print job across the network to a printer that is attached to some other machine. On the client machine, you can add an entry to your /etc/printcap that looks like a local printer but actually routes print jobs to the server machine. This entry will look something like this:

farawaylp|Remote printer entry:\
        :rm=faraway:\
        :rp=lp:\
        :sd=/var/spool/lpd/farawaylp:\
        :mx#0:\
        :sh:

Here the name of the machine where we want to print is faraway, and the name of the printer on that machine is lp. The spool directory, /var/spool/lpd/farawaylp, is where print jobs will be held locally until they can be sent to the remote print spooler, where they may be spooled again before being sent to the printer. Again, you will need to create this spool directory and set its permissions:

# mkdir -p /var/spool/lpd/farawaylp
# chown lp /var/spool/lpd/farawaylp
# chmod 700 /var/spool/lpd/farawaylp
# checkpc -f
# /etc/init.d/lprng restart

Locally, we have given this remote printer the name farawaylp, so we can send print jobs to it thusly:

$ lpr -Pfarawaylp sample.txt