Using the DPMMS Poster Printer

The poster printer is only to be used under supervision

We have an HP DesignJet 500 24. This is a colour inkjet printer which prints on rolls of 2ft (609.6mm) wide paper, and can thus print A1 (594.6mm x 840.9mm) but not A0 (840.9 mm x 1189mm) jobs.

This is the 24in, not the 42in, model and does not have either the the HPGL2 card or the PostScript option (although it should be possible to print PostScript jobs via GhostScript).

Comments on making posters

• Do a practise run sometime before you need the poster. People keep finding that some part of their job doesn't print as expected. Do not expect to be able to just turn up, press print and have the perfect poster appear.
• Design the poster as A1. Scaling up an A4 poster can have unexpected effects
• Bitmap images need to be very big; printers have many more dots than screens. A picture which fills your computer screen will come out about 6cm across on the printer -blow it up to A1 and the dots will be very visible.

TeX/LaTeX Posters

I am aware of three LaTeX poster class definitions:

• a0poster.cls, by Gerlinde Kettl and Matthias Weiser, at http://www.physik.uni-regensburg.de/edv/tips/poster/a0posterstyle/, and updated by Karsten Held at http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/theo3/Comp/hp750c/computing_hp750c_A0.en.shtml.
• aastexposter.cls by Brian Wolven, at http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu/~wolven/posters.html
• beamerposter by Philippe Dreuw and Thomas Deselaers, at http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~dreuw/latexbeamerposter.php. Based upon a0poster.cls

There is advice from Norman Gray on making posters using TeX at http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/docs/posters/ and Stephen Eglen has a customised Cambridge latex poster class: see http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/sje30/damtp/cuposter/

Printing from Laptops

The poster printer is not accessible from either the laptop or departmental networks, but if the poster was designed using a specific application on a laptop, best results may be obtainable by downloading the printer drivers, connecting the laptop to the printer and printing directly from the application.

Links to DesignJet 500 manual and driver for MacOS X.

Printer drivers for Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines are available here.

Under Windows XP we had to connect the printer to the computer, before we were able to installed this printer as a USB printer. It may however be possible to install the printer drivers before you come to the printer, by initially saying that the printer is connected to the parallel port.

(Link to how to print from the laptop network).