I think the core problem is that the Gtk PCB assumes your printer supports Postscript level 3. Level 2 is still popular, and there's really no reason for us to need more than level 1 anyway (HID requires level 1 but adds level 2 comments for page separations in gv et al).
So, if you have a level 1 or 2 printer, the workaround for now is to tell CUPS (or whatever) to pre-render the page using ghostscript (which is level 3) and send the page as a bitmap instead of sending the postscript itself to the printer.