Poster Preparation in EAS - II

I have compiled the following responses from a number of people concerning poster preparation in the Department. This is an open document and will be updated and corrected as necessary.

STEP 1 - Make sure that toner and paper is available. It is always a good idea to send a message to support@eas.slu.edu to warn Eric and Bob that you intend to use the large printer.

STEP 2 - Choose your platform. I have received suggestions so far for the Mac and PC.  

Note that some people have had trouble using the Macs, so the PCs are probably the way to go.

STEP 3 - Choose your program.  Most people use either Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw or Power Point.

STEP 4 - Familiarize yourself with the various Graphics File Formats, particularly how to choose and convert formats for printing.

STEP 5 – Details

(a)   Make sure you choose the canvas size BEFORE you start to compile your image. Trying to scale up an image later doesn’t seem to work.

(b)   Normally you need landscape format – make sure you allow for margins

(c)   In PowerPoint choose a single blank slide as your starting image, then add your panels to that image

(d)   To be able to print directly from power point, set the largest dimension to the maximum of 54” – this will be sufficient for most purposes. If you have a wider (or longer) poster, you will have to go through the procedure below, Step 5(b),

(e)   Some people have problems importing images into Illustrator (on the Mac).

(f)     It is better to choose common fonts (Arial or Times Roman) than a fancy font that may not be available – this is especially true if you use two machines to get the poster printed (see below)

(g)   When you have a final product, scale it down to letter size and print it first on one of the Department color printers to make sure the composition and color is OK.

(h)   Have someone else check either the small format hardcopy, or the onscreen version, to make sure there are no glaring or even subtle errors! Most of the time, you can expect to have only ONE try at printing.

STEP 5 – Printing

(a)   Most people have trouble printing directly to the large format printer from PowerPoint (on office PCs). For some reason the printer drivers are not correct for the HP (someone should fix this). So you have to save your PowerPoint image to a file in a shared directory, go to another machine (e.g. the PCs in Room 332), retrieve the image in Illustrator or Acrobat, and then print it to the large format printer.

(b)   One proven route for printing - which is necessary for PowerPoint posters wider than 54” – is the following:

• Set your PowerPoint to ½ size, for example if you need a 3’ x 6’ poster, set the Page to Landscape and size to 18” x 36” (the maximum is 54” in any direction).

• When you go to print it, select print to file and save it as a *.prn or *.ps file

• Open the print file in Adobe Acrobat, select the Designjet printer (connected to your network) and the page size to the full dimensions (e.g. 36” x 72”).

• Print as normally

(c)   People seem to be using the PCs in Room 332 for printing.

(d)   Printing a full size poster can be very slow. Just transferring and processing the image can take up to an hour, and printing itself can easily take 45 minutes. ALLOW PLENTY OF TIME for printing – not the LAST MINUTE!

 People who can help

The following faculty have successfully printed posters: Herrmann Kirschner, Koper and Zhu. There are many graduate students who know what to do. I would be interested to receive more details from others to help improve this cooksheet.

David Crossley

Last updated 4/27/06