A Few Poster Printing Tips

Below are a few helpful things to consider that were discussed at a Poster Printing Workshop conducted by Gary Fetter.

The CSRS Poster Printer
The HP 500 Designjet Printer is available in the center for printing high-quality, large-format color posters, illustrations, and other documents. The printer prints up to 1200 x600 dpi resolution using HP Thermal Inkjet print technology. Various paper types are available in widths of 24" and 36" including Heavyweight Coated, semi-gloss photo paper, canvas, and high gloss photo paper. The cost to use the printer depends on the type of paper and the size of your document.

Creating your document
Although there are many software programs available for creating posters and large documents, only Microsoft Powerpoint is available in the center. If you've found Powerpoint easy to use for creating presentations, you'll find it just as easy for creating posters. All you need to do is make sure to set your custom page settings to the size of your poster in Powerpoint's Page Setup selection. It's best to stick with standard page sizes such as the common ANSI E size of 34" x 44". Using standard sizes allows you to more easily proportionally reduce or enlarge your document. For example, creating a standard ANSI E size poster will also allow you to easily reduce and print a 17" x 22" (standard ANSI C size) version of your poster. The reverse works just as well too! Click here to view the ANSI, ISO, JIS, and other standards sizes.

Printing your document
One way to reduce the confusion of printing your poster is to turn it into a PDF document before you come to the center to print. Although many software programs are available to create large documents, only Microsoft Powerpoint is available in the CSRS. Therefore, if you have a document that was created in another program, you won't be able to open it on the CSRS computer. If you bring a Microsoft Powerpoint document that uses fonts that are not installed on the CSRS computer, your fonts will not load properly. So, the best choice is to bring the document you would like to print in PDF format.

Once you have your PDF open in Adobe Acrobat on the CSRS computer and are ready to print, it's all about making sure that you have the page size properly selected in the HP 500 Designjet Printer Properties. The size of your poster must match the paper size selected in the Printer Properties.