@cjnazz I would stay away from tplink switches to be honest - they have a bad track record. Current models might be fine. But previous they had an issue where you could not remove vlan 1 from any port.. So they were not actually isolating your vlans.. Tread with caution - there are many other switches in the same price point area that have not demonstrated a complete an utter lack of understanding of how vlans are suppose to work ;)
I have used unifi AP for many years - I have had no issues with them, and setting up vlans to ssid is very simple. I have multiple vlans running on mine (have 3 AP in the house). And use poe injectors.
No real need to setup "routing" out of the box really any router (pfsense included) will auto know how to talk to networks its directly attached to. What you allow or don't allow between your networks/vlans is simple firewall rules.
You would setup different IP ranges for your different vlans, if you want to run dhcp on pfsense for these different networks then yes you would need to set that up on pfsense.
Pfsense should be able to ping anything in a network its attached to yes - unless some firewall on the device your wanting to ping blocked that.
I am not sure how easy or even possible to setup vlans on the unifi APs without the controller. They do have like a phone app you can run to set them up. But not sure if supports setting up vlans. But once they are setup the controller software does not need to be running 24/7.. But you might find it useful in the sense it provides info into your wifi devices - what band and speeds they are connected to, which AP, etc. I run my controller on a vm on my nas..
As to your printer question - access to the printer from other vlans would be a simple firewall rule to allow that.. Discovery might be problematic, airprint for example does not work across vlans. You would want to setup say avahi to allow for discovery if that is something you want to allow and need. But anything that can just put in either the fqdn or IP for the printer would be able to print as long as you allow the printing protocol/port your using via firewall rules.