printing to pdf from word, then from pdf to printer is a better way to go.
for one thing pdf’s are a different form of tiff formats. in other words, a pdf (regardless of how many pages it has) is an pic image, like a tiff file, of the document. as such, sending a pdf via email, instead of an open word document, is more efficient and protects the contents of the document.
also, when you print to a pdf, it gives you the opportunity to inspect the image / print job before sending it to the printer. sure, msword has a print preview. but print preview is not always wysiwyg. so, if the msword document formatting doesn’t match the pdf version of it, then you have the opportunity to figure out what is wrong with the word document formatting and avoid wasting paper on the print job.
lastly, by making a pdf version of the document, you essentially made a back up copy of the word document / file. this is helpful for those times that a word file is corrupted or lost. in such an event, the pdf file can be imported as a tif via msoffice document imaging module (which is included in msoffice) and then the document imaging module can ocr it and send it back into a writable word document again.
the point being, regardless of how good msword is, sometimes when you print the document from it, its not exactly like the version on the screen. and regardless of how good your file system is, it too is not always reliable at preserving word documents / files.
so establishing pdf’ing your documents, is a “good thing”.
incidentally, although the newer version of msword has pdf exporting built in or your version of word doesn’t have pdf capabilities, i would recommend installing a pdf maker on the system, like a freeware called primo pdf.
with a third party pdf maker, you can actually make pdf’s from any software installed on your system not only to avoid wasting paper but to make backups, like email messages, images, print screens, webpages, etc…