That's a classic sequence. But one thing I have never seen explained in a thermal line printer datasheet is that all these operations can be overlapped for a whopping print performance boost (CPU & printer permitting).

The main idea is to clock in the 'future' dot-line just after the latching and during the relatively long 'burn cycle' of the 'current' dot-line.

Also, the motor can be thought of as moving continuously, even though it really is driven in steps. It can in reality be synchronised more loosely with the printing sequence. The paper doesn't have to be at rest during burning. If and when it does come to a halt due to a long burn time (too many dots to burn safely in one cycle), you may have to allow for mechanical reacceleration if you intend to drive the motor to its limit. Same would apply when starting.

To play round with these things, the burn-time (i.e. the strobe pulse width) should ideally be regulated by hardware, for safety reasons.

Using these techniques may result in a slight misalignment between blocks when the dotline is split, but there are tricks for that too - you can drive the strobe lines alternately at a faster rate to fuzz out the transition.

This works becuase although the head shift register must be loaded fully for each dot-line, once latched, you do not need to reload the head when alternating strobe lines.

Just some ideas!
BEC.