Printer test page

Pick the blocks you actually need and download the sheet as a PDF, with real CMYK inks and a printed rule to prove nothing shrank on the way out.

What to print

Combs of hairlines, one per ink. A gap is a blocked nozzle. 5% to 100% of each ink. A cartridge running dry fails at the 5% patch first. Nine groups offset by 0.1 mm each. Whichever prints clean is your correction.

210 × 297 mm · 328 marks · Estimated ink: medium

The preview is a diagram. Your screen is RGB and the sheet is CMYK: close, but not a colour proof.

Size

Orientation

Margin 10 mm Black only For mono lasers, and for saving colour. Asking a printer for magenta it does not have just prints grey. Check rule and corner crosses Prints a 100 mm rule and four crosses. If the rule does not measure exactly 100 mm, the printer rescaled the sheet and nothing else on the page can be trusted.

The PDF carries its geometry in millimetres and its inks in CMYK. What lands on paper is also up to your printer driver: leave the scale at 100% and the quality at normal or better, or the fine blocks are wasted.

Generated right here, in your browser. What you type never leaves your device.

Keep going with Printable paper Online ruler Oven to air fryer Monitor calibration

A printer that has started streaking, dropping a colour or printing text with a fuzzy edge is not usually broken. Something specific has gone wrong, and there are only about six candidates. A test page is how you find out which one, in under a minute, before spending money on a cartridge that was fine.

The pages already offering this hand you a fixed PDF. Sometimes several fixed PDFs — a black one, a colour one, an alignment one — and you download whichever seems closest and print the whole thing. If what you actually need is to check whether the magenta nozzles are clogged, you have just printed a page of photographs to find out.

This one is built to order. Tick the blocks you want, on the paper you own, and it writes the PDF in front of you. The inks are specified in real CMYK, so pure cyan is cyan and nothing else. And because a sheet that got silently shrunk on the way to the paper makes every block on it a lie, there is a 100 mm rule printed in the margin that you can put a ruler against.

Manual

How to use it

1
Start with nozzles, tints and alignment

Those three are on by default and they cover most of what goes wrong. Together they use almost no ink: the whole sheet is hairlines and small patches.
2
Turn on "black only" if you have a mono laser

Or if you just want to check the black channel without spending colour. Asking a printer for magenta it does not have prints grey, and a grey comb tells you nothing at all.
3
Set your paper size

A4, A3, A5, Letter or Legal, portrait or landscape. If the blocks you picked do not fit, the sheet flows onto a second page rather than cutting one in half — a half-drawn alignment vernier reads exactly like a misaligned head.
4
Leave the check rule on for the first print

It adds a 100 mm rule with a tick every 10 mm, plus four corner crosses, and it says on the sheet what it is for.
5
Print at 100%

In the print dialogue set the scale to **100%** or **Actual size**, and turn off "Fit to page" and "Shrink oversized pages". Set the quality to normal or better: draft mode skips passes, and a comb printed in draft has gaps that are not your printer's fault.
6
Measure the rule, then read the sheet

If the rule is not 100 mm, fix the dialogue and print again — nothing else on the page is worth reading yet. If it is, work down the blocks. The troubleshooting list below is arranged by what you are looking at.

In depth

Things worth keeping in mind

What each block is actually telling you

The blocks are not interchangeable and they fail in different ways, which is the whole reason for letting you pick them rather than handing you all seven.

Nozzle check — is every nozzle firing? A gap is a blockage. Cheapest block on the sheet and the one to print first.
Tint ramps — the colour bars, printed as a ramp per ink rather than one solid patch. Is the ink flowing evenly at low coverage? A cartridge running low prints a convincing solid and loses the 5% patch, so this is the block that catches a fade before it ruins a photograph.
Neutral wedge — is your grey neutral? The top row is black ink alone, the bottom the same greys built from CMY. Any cast between them is a colour balance issue, not a fault.
Alignment — are the two head passes meeting? Nine vernier groups, and the clean one is your correction number.
Line weight — the sharpness test: what is the finest line your printer and paper can hold? Also the fastest way to tell a laser from an inkjet on plain paper.
Text — where does legibility give out? Twelve point down to four, which is the range small print actually uses.
Solid ink — banding, roller marks and wet-ink smearing only show in flat coverage. Off by default, because it is the only block that costs real money.

Inkjet and laser fail differently

Almost every printer guide online treats these as one machine, and they are not remotely the same. An inkjet sprays liquid through hundreds of microscopic nozzles; a laser charges a drum, dusts it with toner and melts the toner onto the paper. There is no failure they share.

An inkjet dries out. Its characteristic faults are missing nozzles, colour casts from an unbalanced set of cartridges, wicking on plain paper, and smearing when it lays too much ink down. It fails gradually and gets better with a cleaning cycle.

A laser wears out. Its characteristic faults are repeating marks once per drum or roller revolution, a vertical streak where the drum is scratched, toner that rubs off because the fuser is not reaching temperature, and grey fogging across the whole page. None of those improve with a cleaning cycle, and most of them mean a part needs replacing.

The useful diagnostic is the ruler. Marks that repeat at a fixed interval are mechanical and belong to a laser; marks that are missing rather than added are nozzles and belong to an inkjet.

What this page cannot control

The file is exact. Everything after it is not, and it is worth being clear about where the boundary sits.

The PDF fixes the page size, the position of every mark and the ink each one is printed with. It cannot set your print dialogue's scale, choose your paper type, pick a quality mode, or reach the last few millimetres at the edge of the sheet that your printer physically cannot print into. All of those are the driver's, and all of them change what you see.

That is why the check rule exists rather than a promise. And it is why the first instruction is to set the scale to 100% and the quality to normal: those two settings account for most of the cases where a perfectly healthy printer appears to fail its own test page.

History

Where the test page came from

Four-colour printing is three hundred years old. Jacob Christoph Le Blon, working in Amsterdam and then London in the 1710s, printed pictures from three mezzotint plates inked in red, yellow and blue, on the theory that any colour could be built from three. He was right about the theory and wrong about the pigments, and he eventually added a fourth plate in black to get shadows that did not come out muddy. That fourth plate is still there.

Printers have needed a way to prove themselves for as long as they have existed, but the test page as a domestic object arrived with the desktop. Adobe published PostScript in 1984 and Apple shipped the LaserWriter with it in 1985, which put a device with a genuine failure surface — toner, a drum, a fuser, registration — on an ordinary desk. Both Windows and the Mac grew a "print a test page" button, and it printed the manufacturer's logo and the driver version, which proved the cable worked and almost nothing else.

The nozzle check is younger and more specific. HP's ThinkJet made inkjet printing mass-market in 1984, and Epson's Stylus Color in 1994 put photo-capable colour inkjets in homes. Inkjets fail in a way lasers do not: the ink dries in the head, one nozzle at a time, and the only way to see which is to fire every nozzle once and look. So the manufacturers drew the comb — a short stroke from each nozzle, staggered so a gap is obvious — and it has barely changed since.

What has changed is who prints. A home printer now sits unused for weeks at a time, which is precisely the condition that dries a head out, and the pattern designed for a 1994 office is the diagnostic that a 2026 household needs most and owns least.

1719: Le Blon patents three-colour printing
1985: The LaserWriter puts PostScript on a desk
1994: Epson Stylus Color brings the nozzle check home
1/72 in: One PDF point, the unit this sheet is built in

How it works

Why the inks are specified in CMYK

Your screen makes colour by adding light: red, green and blue emitters, all off for black and all on for white. Paper makes colour by taking light away. Ink is a filter — cyan ink absorbs red and reflects the rest — so the more you put down, the darker it gets. The two systems are opposites, and there is no arrangement of them under which a screen colour and an ink colour are the same thing.

That matters here more than on any other kind of page. If a test sheet asks for RGB cyan, the printer driver has to decide what mixture of inks makes that colour, and the answer usually includes a little magenta and a little black. So a "cyan" comb printed from RGB is not testing the cyan nozzles: it is testing three channels at once, and a gap in it could be any of them.

A PDF can specify colour directly in **DeviceCMYK**, and this one does. Pure cyan is written as `1 0 0 0` — full cyan, no magenta, no yellow, no black — and the printer lays down one ink. A gap in that comb is that one channel. This is the difference between a test page and a colourful page, and it is invisible on screen, which is why the preview here is honestly labelled a diagram rather than a proof.

The rest follows the same logic. The page rectangle is declared in points, of which there are exactly 72 to the inch, so an A4 sheet is 595.28 × 841.89 points and a 0.12 mm hairline is 0.34 points wide wherever it lands. The one thing the file cannot control is the print dialogue, and that is what the 100 mm rule is for.

By hand

Reading a nozzle check without any software

The pattern is deliberately simple, and once you can read one you can read the one your printer's own utility produces, which is the same idea drawn slightly differently.

1

Each row is one ink. Do not compare rows to each other yet — inks genuinely differ in density, and yellow always looks fainter than the rest because your eye is least sensitive to it.
2

A missing stroke is a blocked nozzle. A whole comb that is present but pale is a cartridge running low, or a head that needs a clean but is not blocked yet. These have different fixes, and the tint ramp below tells them apart: a low cartridge fails at the 5% patch and still prints the solid.
3

Alternate strokes sit 2.5 mm higher. A gap in the lower row has the upper row either side of it to compare against, which is why a hole is unmistakable and an evenly faint comb is not.
4

One or two strokes is a partial blockage and usually clears with a single head clean. Half a comb gone is air in the line, which needs the deeper "power clean" and sometimes a cartridge reseat.
5

Each cleaning cycle pushes a measurable amount of ink through the head and into the waste pad. Three in a row rarely does what one plus an overnight rest will.

Diagnosis

If something is not working

Symptom:One comb has gaps in it; the others look fine

Likely cause:: Nozzles in that one ink channel have dried up. This is the ordinary failure of a printer that sat unused for a few weeks.
What to do:: Run one head cleaning cycle from the printer's own menu or its desktop utility, then print this sheet again. If it improved but is not clear, run one more. If two cleanings do nothing, leave the printer switched on and idle overnight — the ink softens — and try once more in the morning before buying anything.

Symptom:A whole comb is missing, or everything is pale

Likely cause:: An empty cartridge, or air drawn into the line after a cartridge ran dry and kept printing.
What to do:: Check the ink level, then take the cartridge out and put it back in firmly — a bad seat looks exactly like an empty tank. On a tank printer, look at whether the tube from the tank has bubbles in it and run the deeper "power" clean once. Only then replace anything.

Symptom:Pale, even bands running across the solid blocks

Likely cause:: Either the paper is stepping unevenly through the printer, or the head passes are not quite meeting.
What to do:: Take the paper out, fan the stack and put it back squarely. Check that the paper type in the driver matches what is loaded — a printer told "plain" while fed glossy lays ink down wrong. Then run the printer's alignment routine and print this sheet again.

Symptom:Every group in the alignment block looks doubled

Likely cause:: The head is out of alignment in both directions, or the paper is skewing as it feeds.
What to do:: Run the printer's own bidirectional alignment from its menu, which is the only thing that can actually correct it, and reprint. If it still doubles, check that the paper guides are snug against the stack — a sheet that arrives at an angle doubles every line on the page.

Symptom:A mark that repeats at the same spacing down the page

Likely cause:: On a laser, something round is damaged or dirty and stamps the page once per revolution.
What to do:: Measure the distance between two repeats with a ruler. Roughly 75 to 95 mm usually means the drum; a shorter spacing usually means a roller. Take the toner cartridge out, look at the drum surface in good light, and if the mark is on the drum the cartridge needs replacing rather than cleaning.

Symptom:The greys have a pink or green cast

Likely cause:: Nothing is broken. Grey built from cyan, magenta and yellow shows any imbalance between them, and no set of pigments is perfectly neutral.
What to do:: Compare the two rows of the neutral wedge: the top row is black ink alone and should be neutral, the bottom is CMY and probably is not. For text and documents, set the driver to print in greyscale or black only, which uses the top row's ink and sidesteps the problem entirely.

Symptom:Ink smears when you touch the page

Likely cause:: Too much ink for the paper, or the sheet was handled before it dried.
What to do:: Give it a minute. Then check the paper type setting matches the paper, drop the quality one step, and try a heavier sheet — thin paper cannot absorb a solid block and it stays wet on the surface.

Symptom:The fine lines are a smudge, but everything else is fine

Likely cause:: Ink spreading into the paper fibres. This is what plain paper does and it is not a fault.
What to do:: Nothing to fix on the printer. If you need fine lines to hold, use a coated or inkjet-specific paper, which has a surface layer that stops the wicking. The line-weight block tells you the finest rule your combination of printer and paper can actually hold.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

The K in CMYK is not for "black"

It stands for **key** — the key plate, the one carrying the detail and the outlines that the three colour plates were registered against. Printers had used the term for decades before anyone needed an acronym. The convenient story that K avoids confusion with the B in RGB is a later invention, and a tidy one, but the word came first.

Four inks make a bad black

Cyan, magenta and yellow at full strength should absorb all the light and give you black. In practice pigments are impure and you get a muddy brown, and you have soaked the paper with three layers of wet ink to get it. That is why the fourth ink exists and why body text is printed with K alone. The neutral wedge on this sheet shows you both, one above the other, so the cast is a comparison rather than a memory.

A laser has no nozzles to clog

It has a photosensitive drum, a laser scanning across it, and toner that gets fused with heat. So a laser never produces the gap-in-a-comb failure at all. What it produces instead is a mark that repeats at a fixed interval down the page — once per drum revolution, or once per roller — and measuring the gap between two repeats tells you which part is at fault.

The alignment block is a vernier

Same trick as a caliper. Nine groups print a set of lines on the head's left-to-right pass and a second set on the return, displaced by a tenth of a millimetre more in each group. Your eye cannot judge a 0.1 mm error directly, but it is extremely good at spotting which of nine groups looks like solid lines rather than doubled ones — and that group's number is the correction.

Hamburgefonstiv is a type designer's word

The text block prints it because it is not a pangram and was never meant to be. It packs the letterforms that carry most of a typeface's character — the round o and e, the ascender on h and f, the descender on g — into one word, so a designer can judge a face without setting a paragraph. Here it does the same job for a printer: if the g fills in at 6 point, the head is spreading ink.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Does this use a lot of ink?

With the default blocks, no. Nozzle combs, tint ramps and alignment verniers are hairlines and small patches, and you can reprint them freely. The one block that genuinely costs money is "Solid ink", which is off by default and is the only one that lays down flat coverage. The readout beside the preview tells you which band the current sheet is in.

Why does the printed colour not match my screen?

It cannot, and no browser tool can make it. Your screen emits light and paper reflects it, the two gamuts only partly overlap, and matching them properly needs the printer's ICC profile for the exact paper you have loaded. The preview here is a diagram of the layout, not a soft proof, and it says so. If you need real print matching, that is what a colorimeter and a profiled workflow are for.

Can I use this on a black and white laser?

Yes — turn on "Black only". You will get the K comb, the K tint ramp, the neutral wedge, the alignment vernier and the line-weight block, all of which mean something on a laser. Skip the nozzle interpretation: a laser has no nozzles, so what you are reading in that block is toner delivery and drum condition.

Is anything uploaded?

No. The PDF is generated in your browser and never leaves it. There is no account, no upload and no server involved — the whole site is static files.

Why did my sheet come out on two pages?

Because the blocks you picked need more room than the paper has. Rather than cut a block in half, which would make a partial alignment vernier look like a misaligned head, it flows onto another page. Untick a block or move to a larger paper size to get back to one sheet.

The 100 mm rule measures 97 mm. What now?

Your print dialogue scaled the page by three per cent, which means every hairline and every patch on it is three per cent off too. Reprint with the scale set to 100% or "Actual size", and with "Fit to page" and "Shrink oversized pages" turned off. Nothing else on the sheet is worth reading until that rule measures right.

Should I print it in draft mode to save ink?

No. Draft mode prints in fewer passes with less ink on purpose, which puts gaps in the nozzle comb and softens the fine lines. You would be diagnosing the draft setting rather than the printer. Use normal or high quality — the default sheet is cheap enough that it does not matter.