Comment 49 for bug 282186

The CUPS test page is not simply a representation of a document to be printed, like the PostScript files which you get from applications, it is a PostScript program (note that PS is a programming language like Python or Perl), The CUPS test page (and also the HPLIP test page as it is a hacked CUPS test page) asks the PostScript interpreter for the page size, resolution, margins, interpreter version, ... and then it draws its content in the size which it got from the interpreter. In the PDF workflo everything is converted to PDF before further processing. This also includes the CUPS test page, making it executed by a PostScript interpreter (Ghostscript called by the pstopdf CUPS filter). Normally the CUPS test page is designed to be executed on the rasterizing process for the printer, either in the printer itself or by the last CUPS filter step where Ghostscript is called together with the printer driver.

As one usually sends normal print jobs and not test pages we must design the filters to get the best out of normal print jobs. Test pages are not sent often and they should be designed to resemble normal documents,, so a PDF file looking more or less like the Ubuntu test page would be a good solution.