Creating, Printing & Laminating Posters And Large Documents

The old plotter harris has been replaced with indiana. For legacy the old harris instructions are available here. Below are the new instructions for printing from indiana.

• Introduction
• Before you start
• Working in Unix / Linux
• Working in Windows/MacOS
• Advanced topics and troubleshooting

Introduction

CVSSP has an A0 printer, laminator and guillotine. These allow us to produce posters for conferences and open days in house. The printer and laminator are located in the postroom (12AB05) and the guillotine is located in the photocopying room (1AB05).

For Non-CVSSP Members:

If you're not part of CVSSP then please contact your computer rep to actually get the poster printed. Computer Reps will need a cost code for printing. Prices are as follows;

*Rejects: Posters that are printed but not used because of layout or other faults deemed caused before printing will be charged for at this rate. This includes any waste of materials caused by bad printing but not directly related to the printer (i.e. if the file itself is corrupted).

Before you start

Preview your work. It is surprising how many errors you can spot on a print out that you miss on the screen. It is always a good idea to print out a colour version of your poster A4 size before trying to print the poster A0 size. Most applications will allow you to do this, but make sure you have scaled down to A4 before printing!

It is always a good idea to go to the print room (12AB05) and check that indiana is on and waiting. At this point you might also want to switch on the laminator so that it is up to temperature when you come to laminate your poster.

Having checked that indiana is ready you can then check on the print queue by going to the CUPS web page for indiana. The Printer State should read "Printer State: idle, accepting jobs." and the print queue should state "No Active Jobs". If there are any jobs listed and they are more than a few minutes old they may be the result of a failed attempt by a previous user. If this is the case you should contact a member of the support team to ask for the print queue to be cleared before proceeding.

Consumables

If the plotter needs more ink or paper, contact the centre administrator. You can see the ink levels on the screen - again worth while checking so you don't run out half way through your poster.

Working in Unix / Linux

The printer is available as a standard system printer on Linux systems and can accept HP PCL-5, PS (level 3) and PDF format files. Use the command lpr -l -Pindiana file.ps to submit files

The easiest way to print from Unix / Linux is to generate a correctly sized pdf and then print that from Acroread on a supported system.

• latex tips
  • Create a pdf file, using pdflatex
  • If this is not supported by your choice of poster template, you can use latex + dvipdfm
  • If this does not work you can also use latex + dvips + ps2pdf. Use the "-dEncodeColorImages=false" flag with ps2pdf to avoid poor quality images.
  • Some hints about latex templates for posters.

To open the pdf with acroread type:

acroread <myfile>.pdf

To print the poster do the following:

• Select File -> Print... from the main menu
• Select indiana from the printer list
• Click the "Properties" button and select the desired page size (usually A0 or A1)
• Set "Page Scaling" to "Fit to Printable Area"
• Check the "Auto rotate and center" box
• Set the "Orientation" to Portrait for A0 and Landscape for A1 (ignore your poster's orientation, this makes the printout fit onto the paper roll, Adobe will rotate your poster to fit the chosen orientation.)
• Hit "Print"

Working in Windows/MacOS

There is the web interface. This can be used to print a PostScript or PDF file. The preview function requires admin rights as does releasing a job from hold status or deleting/cancelling jobs so be careful how you use this interface.

To print the poster do the following:

• Select "Submit Job" from the menu on the left
• Use the "Choose File" button at the top of the page to select your pdf
• Enter your username in the box provided
• Control Settings
  • "Copies" should be 1
  • "Hold For Preview" should be "No".
• Paper
  • Page Size - select "Standard" and ISO A0 or ISO A1 from the drop down.
  • Set the "Orientation" to "Portrait" for A0 and "Landscape" for A1
• Resizing
  • Select "Scale to" ISO A0 or ISO A1 from the drop down.
  • Set the "Orientation" to "Portrait" for A0 and "Landscape" for A1
• Transformations (PDFs only)
  • If your poster is A0 and portrait then rotate "0 degrees"
  • If your poster is A0 and landscape then rotate "90 degrees"
  • If your poster is A1 and portrait then rotate "90 degrees"
  • If your poster is A1 and landscape then rotate "0 degrees"
• Click Print

Advanced topics and troubleshooting

Cancelling your job

Sometimes you notice an error in your poster or the printer goes awry and starts printing in black and white, or just printing solid black. To save on ink and paper you should cancel the job as soon as you notice something going wrong. First of all cancel your job from a terminal on any supported Unix system by typing

rsh cvpsys01 lprm -Pindiana

Last edited by: Helen Cooper.

Last modified: Friday May 29th 17:11 GMT 2009