Poster Preparation Recommendations
Dr. Don Stierman
Last updated 11/03/2008
Plan ahead! Most students and faculty use PowerPoint to assemble a poster paper. Do not plan to print your poster the day before you hope to leave for your meeting. You may find the ink supply has just run low, a new roll of paper is needed, or that several others have posters in the pipeline in front of you. The DGL Supervisor might not feel like dropping everything he is doing to help you out of your emergency predicament.
Avoid solid backgrounds, please - one author used a beautiful solid blue background on glossy paper - it looked great but took all afternoon to print and drained an entire cartridge of blue ink. $$ !!
1. Please begin by selecting File - Page Setup in PowerPoint and limit the height of your poster (Landscape orientation) to 42 inches. The printer is usually loaded with a roll of paper that is 44 inches wide, but, I have not figured out how to make the printer use the entire paper. We have also had the ends cut off of the long dimension - apparently the entire length is also unavailable.
Later on, when you have to select a paper size for your poster, among the choices offered by the printer is ANSI E - 36 x 44 inches - but most people use Custom (bottom of list of possible page sizes).
Other paper sizes available for the HP plotter include: 36" x 60", 36" x 84", 36" x 96" and 36" x 108". Some people might prefer a single large poster instead of a pair of smaller posters. If you opt for a longer or higher poster, remember to subtract one inch from each edge when setting up your page in PowerPoint.
If you set up your poster size as 34 inches high by 42 inches wide (34 wide by 42 high in portrait orientation) before you begin adding elements to your poster, you will find ANSI E (36" x 44") among the choices offered during the Setup Printer phase of printing.
You can also set your page size as 'custom'.
If your page is too high, your poster will not print properly and you will waste a lot of time resizing everything on your poster. Plan ahead, save time, avoid panic.
2. What you see is pretty much what you get. Colors and patterns sometimes print differently from how things appear on the monitor. You will learn which patterns work and which ones do not (a poster should not be the first graphic element you print, I am certain). Title and author headlines should be large enough to read from 5 meters away. Zoom to 100% to see (on-screen) what text, graphs and images are going to look like size-wise on the final printed poster.
Use an image editor to resize (reduce in size) any images with an excessively high resolution. Grabbing a corner and reducing the size on screen is not enough. Images require large quantities of memory and bandwidth, which translates into time when you spool and print your poster. Posters printed from really large files bomb more frequently than posters printed from smaller files. Use all of the images you need, but time spent adjusting their size is usually more than recovered during the printing process.
I tend to error on the size of high quality/fat file at the expense of time and bandwidth, but even I have saved megabytes and many minutes by processing photos and images before printing my final product.
Look at posters exhibited on walls of Bowman-Oddy Labs. Judge for yourself what makes a poster efficient and effective, and design your poster accordingly. My art aptitude is nil, please to not ask my advice in arranging elements of your poster unless I am one of your co-authors.
3. Print a preliminary poster on faster, cheaper paper using bo3042hp4600 (check the Scale to Fit box on the Effects dialog page - you get there by clicking Properties after selecting this printer) and then edit your poster as you see fit.
Printing a full-size poster can take hours. The big printer allows the ink to dry (you do not want a smeared poster) and adjusts its printing speed based on paper type, temperature and humidity.
4. Now that your poster is all polished and ready to print, select \\print01\bo3030hpdj500 as your printer. Select Properties to set up paper size, quality and orientation. We usually have a 36-inch roll loaded, select that roll size, and set paper size as ANSI E - 36 x 44 inches (or whichever alternate size you have selected). If your poster is mostly text, drawings and charts, optimize for text (prints faster); if you have images, optimize for images (fine details improved). Best quality = slow printing, but you've planned ahead and have already polished your poster.
Note: posters do not usually need "Best quality" - try your poster first using mid-quality printing or even 'Draft'. I have seen cases where "Best quality" results were inferior to lesser quality - the printer tried to outsmart the author, changing sizes of text boxes and messing up the format of the whole poster. Decreasing the 'quality' setting saves lots of time and probably a lot of ink.
Glossy paper can be used but is too expensive for routine use in the large format printer. Some faculty have their own supply of special paper. Check with your advisor.
Most student computers cannot access the hpdj500 (a necessary precaution to prevent wasting paper when someone in another department makes a printer selection mistake - in 2003, a pharmacy student mistakenly printed 6 copies of her résumé on our large format printer). Your faculty advisor should have access - copy your poster to a ZIP disk or USB mass storage device and your advisor should be able to submit the job to the printer. Department office computers can also access the printer, and I am usually available to help out if you advisor is not here and the office is too busy.
As faculty and students report errors or omissions in this page, I will revise these instruction. Thanks to all who have contributed to this effort.