Printer test page

How this printer test page works

Print at 100% ("Actual size"), then work down the sheet. Check the two reference rules near the foot first: one is exactly 100 mm and one exactly 4 inches, so a ruler on either of them tells you in a second whether the dialog scaled anything, and at any other scale nothing else on the sheet measures true either. In the color bars, look for a primary that has gone pale or vanished (a blocked channel) and for a tint ladder whose lightest two or three steps have collapsed into paper white. In the gray wedge, look for a color cast, and for steps at the dark end that have merged. In the resolution ladder, find the finest line your printer still prints as a clean line before it breaks up into a dotted gray trace, and remember that width the next time you set a line weight. "Margins only" does a different job: it draws frames at 3, 5, 8, 10, 13, 15 and 20 mm from the paper's own edge, and the innermost one your printer drops is the width of its mechanical dead zone.

Every mark on the sheet is SVG geometry in real millimeters, sized to the paper you picked, and the page declares that paper size to your browser at print time, so the print pipeline has nothing to rescale. The color patches are sRGB values, not CMYK ink: cyan is #00ffff, each tint ladder mixes its channel toward paper white in ten steps, and the grayscale wedge runs from 0% to 100% in eleven steps with no repeated value. The line-resolution ladder and the text-size samples stay the same whatever you set in the controls: their widths (0.08 mm up to 0.4 mm) and their point sizes (4 pt up to 12 pt) are fixed, so the ladder you print next month matches the one you print today. Each width is drawn as a horizontal line and again as a row of short vertical strokes, so a printer that loses fine lines in one direction only will show it. Each text sample names its own point size and is set at it, from "4 pt Handgloves 0123456789" up to "12 pt Handgloves 0123456789". If your paper and margin leave too little height for every band, the sheet leaves bands off the end of the list and names them in a note; a smaller margin or portrait orientation brings them back. The foot of each sheet is stamped with the pattern it shows and its ink estimate. That "Est. ink" figure, also shown in the readout, adds up every filled area and stroked line as the sheet is drawn, weighted by how much ink its sRGB value implies, so the readout matches the sheet you print.

This page cannot measure what your printer put on the paper: a browser has no instrument on the output side, and reading printed color takes a colorimeter or a spectrophotometer. So the sheet does not manage color, check a profile or make a proof. It does print identically every time, which lets you compare today's print with one from before a head clean or a cartridge change and spot a channel or tone range that has failed outright, with no instrument at all. The ink estimate counts filled areas and strokes but leaves out text, because glyph coverage depends on the font your printer resolves.

Color printer test page

For a color test, set the pattern control to Color only. The sheet becomes the seven primary bars (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, then red, green and blue) over the four per-channel tint ladders, scaled up to fill the page. Each bar is labelled with its color name and sRGB value, and each ladder with its channel. It is the "Full sheet" pattern with the gray, resolution, type and registration bands switched off. The bars are the fastest way to see a dead or starved channel. The ladders are where a nearly empty cartridge shows itself first, because the light steps stop separating before the solid bar looks any different.