Comment 3 for bug 126139

I have solved this problem now upstream in Foomatic. Foomatic has a facility for page accounting for all drivers, but this works by adding PostScript code into the PostScript data stream. This PostScript code can only pass the page counters to CUPS if it is executed by GhostScript and not for example in a printer. Also some of the drivers can be incompatible with the inserted accounting code. Therefore Foomatic's page accounting is turned off by default in the Debian and Ubuntu packages.

I have now added a feature to Foomatic that accounting can be suppressed on a per-driver basis. So in general accounting can be turned on again and if a driver is not compatible accounting will be turned off for it in its Foomatic driver XML file. In upstream Foomatic I have turned off accounting for the "Postscript" driver for now as it does not use Ghostscript.

With the next Ubuntu releases of Foomatic this feature will get available and I will turn on page accounting by default then.