How to make/print posters

Using the physics department poster printer
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July 2008 instructions, written by Pearl Young

  1. Make your poster in powerpoint. Specify the dimesions of your powerpoint slide to the final dimensions of your poster. The SURE program recommends poster be 44" high and 48-54" wide.
  2. Install \\scribe\Macro as a printer on your computer or print off a computer that already has \\scribe\Macro as a printer.
  3. Make sure the poster printer is on, has paper and ink, etc. Take note of the width of the paper roll while you are there as you will need it in step 6.
  4. To print from a Weeks lab computer: Open the powerpoint file that you would like to print.
  5. Choose File --> Print, and then select \\scribe\macro as your printer.
  6. Select properties (next to the printer choice.) Go to the paper quality tab and select "advanced".
  7. Paper size should be "PostScript Custom Paper Size." "Edit custom paper size" to be the dimensions of your poster & select whether the long or the short side feeds in first. This should correspond with your measurement of the paper roll width in step 3.
  8. Click "OK" twice and return to the original "print" menu. Make sure none of the extra options are selected (Grayscale, Scale to paper size, etc.) And then select PRINT!
  9. You may want to check the printer after a while to make sure it's printing what you want. It took about 15 minutes for the printer to receive my file and then about an hour to print it.

Older version, written by Piotr Habdas

  1. Go to ducttape
  2. Log in and double click the corel draw 12 icon
  3. click open and in the c:\Temp\ directory there is a file called FreshSemPoster3.cdr which you should open This is your file to edit.
  4. First important thing you need to do before pasting any text or figures is to set the size of your page. So, find out at the conference site what is the size of the poster they want then go to Layout and scroll down to Page Setup. Then you can input the size of the poster (width and height).
  5. Now you're ready to copy/past/type pictures or text. To type a new text click "A" on the tool bar to the left. If you want to edit old text: click just double left click on it.
  6. If you're finished with your poster and you are happy with it, and what's more important Eric likes it it's time to prepare it for prining. First, save it as usual cdr (corel draw) file. You should be doing this along making the poster anyway. Then export it as AI file (Adobe Illustrator) by going to File and clicking Export and choosing the AI file type. You have some more parameters that you can play with, I never did, before clicking the Export button.
  7. Now you have file to print. Close the Corel Draw and open your exported file with Adobe Photoshop. Be patient it takes some time. I left the AI file in the Temp directory also.
  8. It's time to print !!! Go to File, and setup the printer. Make sure the printer that you are going to print on is \\Scribe\macro. If you print your poster on EH_print01 it will be very small. Change the paper size to 44" by 62" or smaller. The width of the paper in the printer is 44" but double check this with Jon Carr who it's a good idea to call before prining (make sure the printer is on, etc). Chose Landscape orientation.
  9. Then, go to File and choose the print options. This is important step. If you set up the printer correctly you will see a preview of your poster on a sheet of paper and it's dimensions to the right of that preview. You, can now scale the poster to fit the paper or change it's orientation. Just make sure it looks fine and you're happy with the poster's dimensions.
  10. Still in the Print Options Hit PRINTTTTTTTTT and be patient, it can more than 4 hours to print the poster.

NOTES: