Printer test pages made in Synfig

Svarov · October 25, 2025, 5:58am

Hey all,

I’ve been quite busy on my new workplace. I am working as a system administrator in a school and it’s pretty tough. The school complex is 10 buildings (schools + kindergartens) so it’s a lot of tickets like “jammed paper/printer doesn’t print/projector doesn’t turn on/can’t login into my e-mail/help I am completely useless at technology” and stuff like that. It’s tough not in a sense of complexity but more like, physically tough, you need to be constantly on the run between different buildings, it’s exhausting.

And of course, there are TONS of printers. Monochrome ones are installed almost in every classroom. Teachers need to print a lot (homework, tests, educational materials, etc.) and of course there is a bunch of color printers too, used mostly for promotional materials and junior classes.

Printers obviously need maintenance that I have to do (like cleaning rollers, replacing parts) and after that I need to check if printer still works properly. I was using some generic test pages from the internet, but I wasn’t satisfied, I wanted something cooler. So I found some public domain vector art on the internet and made a simple composition in Synfig for purpose of testing printer’s capabilities.

Here’s a monochrome test page:

Vector art (cat): Not mine, found on the https://publicdomainvectors.org/
Excerpt from a poem by W. B. Yeats
Composition: Me
License: Public domain (composition + vector art)

And this one is a color test page:

Vector art (phoenix): Not mine, found on the https://publicdomainvectors.org/
Excerpt from a poem by Christopher Partridge
Composition: Me
License: Public domain (composition + vector art)
I went a little overboard with effects on this one, had to split the render in two parts for 600 DPI.

Color test page printed on a strongly used Bizhub C3851 that had majority of its parts changed using your typical A4 office paper:

I’d say it’s decent. You can see some artifacts, colors are a bit off but it’s OK for school purposes.

Finally, an archive containing everything rendered at 600 DPI + sources + additional test pages for solid colors (CMYK + RGB):

600-TestPages.zip

BobSynfig · October 25, 2025, 1:33pm

= “Help, I don’t want to spend time to read the user’s manual. I prefer the job to be done by someone else. The use of technology is a lot hard for me. I even made a video about it that I shared with my 500k+ subscribers on my social networks”

In my youth, they were using mostly “polycopier” (spirit duplicator).
A lot of them.
The typical smell of a classroom was alcohol and some were waiting the distribution to sniff the papers.

Fun fact:
In 1956, they stopped to serve … alcoholic drinks in school canteens … for the children under 14!

No wonder why France was a country of alcoholics (still is), trained from the youngest age for this.

Svarov · October 26, 2025, 4:22am

I have never heard about machines like that… I was growing up in the 90s, so CRTs, 386/early Pentium’s and I even remember matrix printers I think.

Well, I am Russian and we didn’t have alcoholic drinks in school canteens but that didn’t stop us from becoming a country of alcoholics, lol. It’s nice to know our countries have something in common
Oh wait, there’s also a flag, both have same colors which is pretty neat and a bit of less depressing similarity.

BobSynfig · October 26, 2025, 2:17pm

Images from this X post: https://x.com/Generations7080/status/1591878820231286785

Disclaimer: Never do this, it damages the neurons.
You can see everyday the sequels it has left on people of my generation.

Majkel · October 27, 2025, 12:35am

So it’s not that different from drinking it which kills grey matter

KEgg · October 30, 2025, 3:53pm

that literally just jogged a memory and that smell just came flooding back to me.. that, acetate and marker pens for overhead projectors

BobSynfig · October 30, 2025, 4:08pm

There is always a smell of school in our memories ^^