Printable PDF
Generate a vector PDF in A4 or US Letter directly in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Use it when the printer is on another computer, when you want the same reference file before and after a repair, or when a phone print dialog hides the scale setting.
Generated locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
8 pt — Fine text should remain crisp, evenly filled and easy to read without halos, feathering or broken strokes.
6 pt — If this line is legible and consistent, your printer is resolving small type well.Print it right
A scaled or economy-mode print can look like a printer fault. Start with a controlled print before changing ink, toner, or hardware.
A4 is 210 × 297 mm and is standard almost everywhere outside North America. US Letter is 8.5 × 11 in (215.9 × 279.4 mm), wider and shorter. Choose the one loaded, not the one you prefer; a mismatch makes most viewers scale the page silently.
Download PDF writes the file to your device using code running in your browser; this site never receives it. Print test page uses the browser’s own print path instead. Both give the same patterns, so use the PDF when you need to move the test to another machine or keep a copy.
In Acrobat, Preview, Edge or your phone’s viewer, choose Actual size or 100% and turn off Fit to page, Shrink oversized pages, Auto-rotate and any borderless or poster mode. Then check that the printed outer border is a single, roughly centered rectangle.
Read the result
The border sits 14 mm inside every edge, well within any normal printer margin, so a cropped border almost always means the viewer scaled the page, borderless mode enlarged it, or the loaded paper is not the size selected.
Match the paper size in the tray, the driver and the viewer, set Actual size, and turn off borderless. Losing a millimeter or two is normal; losing a whole side is a mismatch.
The viewer applied Fit or Shrink, usually because the PDF size and the driver’s paper size differ: an A4 file with a Letter driver setting or the reverse.
Set the driver paper size to match the file, then Actual size. A4 forced onto Letter shrinks to about 94%; Letter onto A4 to about 97%.
They travel different paths. The browser rasterizes through its own print engine; the PDF viewer hands vector data to the driver. Each dialog can hold a different quality preset, color setting or even a different printer.
Open both print dialogs, set Normal quality, default color and the same paper type in each, and reprint.
The file is vector, so softness cannot come from the file. It comes from the driver quality setting, head alignment, ink spread on the paper, or a low-resolution mode.
Print the printer’s built-in quality report. If that is also soft the printer needs alignment or supplies; if not, the driver preset is at fault.
Something between viewer and printer is set to Black only or Grayscale, or the driver is on a text preset.
Choose Color in the print dialog and reprint. If you are printing the web page rather than the PDF, also enable Background graphics in the browser dialog.
The hairlines in the PDF are 0.15 mm wide, about three or four dots at 600 dpi. They disappear in Draft mode, on very absorbent paper, or when a viewer rasterizes at low resolution before printing.
Use Normal or better quality on plain 80 g/m² paper, and print from a PDF viewer rather than a browser preview when possible.
A PDF fixes the geometry. Every line, block and letter is stored as a vector instruction with a position in millimeters, so the file prints the same on a phone-connected inkjet in one country and an office laser in another. A screenshot or a photo of a test page cannot do that: it is resampled to the printer’s resolution, compressed, and scaled by whatever viewer opens it.
That repeatability is what makes before-and-after comparison honest. Print the PDF, run one cleaning cycle or change one cartridge, print it again from the same file with the same settings, and put the two sheets side by side. Any change you see came from the printer, not from the test.
Three things have to agree: the paper format in the PDF, the paper size selected in the driver, and the paper actually loaded. When they do not, viewers quietly rescale. A4 content forced onto Letter shrinks to about 94% because Letter is 17.6 mm shorter; Letter content on A4 shrinks to about 97% because A4 is 5.9 mm narrower. Either scaling is harmless for a quick ink check and fatal for a margin or alignment check.
The PDF is assembled entirely in your browser by a small JavaScript library and saved to your device. Nothing about your printer, computer or network is sent to this site; the only thing recorded is a standard analytics event noting that a PDF was downloaded and which test type and paper size were chosen. The file itself contains only drawing instructions and a reference to the standard Helvetica font, so it opens in any PDF viewer, including the one built into your browser.
FAQ
Yes. Choose Complete, Color or Black, pick A4 or US Letter, and click Download PDF. The file is generated in your browser and saved to your downloads folder with a name like printer-test-page-full-a4.pdf. Open it and print at Actual size.
Choose whatever is actually loaded in the tray. A4 is the standard sheet in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and most of Latin America; US Letter is standard in the United States, Canada and Mexico. If the tray and the file differ, the viewer will usually shrink the page a few percent, which spoils margin and alignment checks.
Your viewer is applying Fit, Shrink oversized pages or Scale to fit, most often because the PDF page size and the driver’s paper size do not match. Set the driver to the same size as the file, choose Actual size or 100%, and turn off borderless or poster modes. A4 forced onto Letter comes out at about 94%.
Yes. Download it, open it in the Files app, Google Drive or a PDF viewer, and use Share or the menu to print through AirPrint, Mopria or the printer maker’s app. Mobile print dialogs often hide scale options, so check the printed border: if it is centered and not cropped, the scale is right.
Yes. It is created on your device by code running in the browser, contains only drawing commands and text, and is never uploaded. It has no scripts, forms or links. You can open it in any PDF viewer or print it directly from a printer’s USB port on models that support that.
They test slightly different paths. The browser print uses your browser’s print engine; the PDF uses your viewer and gives you a fixed file to reuse. When you need a repeatable before-and-after comparison, or the printer is on another device, use the PDF. When you just want a fast check, print the page.