Correct and Incorrect Accounting

While printing in CUPS, the count should be tracked correctly. The filter pstops will give the correct count value when the printfile passes through it. Without this filtering, CUPS will use a dummy count of "one". Some print files (for example image files) do not pass through this filter. But that doesn't affect the accounting as most of the image files are one page jobs. This also means that proprietary drivers for the target printer running on the client computers and CUPS/Samba, which then spool these files as "raw" (leaving them untouched, not filtering them), will be counted as a one page file as well. In such a scenario, you need to send PostScript from the clients (that is, run a PostScript driver on the client machine to have proper accounting of the correct number of pages). If the printer is a non-PostScript model, you need to let CUPS convert the file to a print-ready format for the target printer.