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PIRL maintains a high-quality, wide-format, roll-media inkjet printer suitable for printing posters for conferences, public outreach, and other purposes. It supports a wide range of paper and ink types; normally it contains a 42-inch wide roll of paper, but some specialized media are available only in a 36-inch wide format. This printer is an HP DesignJet 5000, referred to simply as the HP-5000. The HP-5000 is located in Sonett 102J, just around the corner when you exit the PIRL user room from the northwest door.
Creating a poster for the HP-5000 is a fairly straightforward process that can be generalized into two basic phases:
Phase 1: Design and create the poster. This guide covers the bare basics of four applications.
Phase 2: Generate a 200-300 dpi raster image from your poster. It is this image file that you will send to the printer. JPEGs and TIFFs work quite well. PDFs are not raster files.
You can use virtually any suitable application in the creation of your poster. Indeed, you are probably better off using one with which you are familiar if it is not one of the four covered in this guide.
Regardless of what you use to create your poster, however, remember the Golden Rule of Printing a Poster with the HP-5000: Ultimately, you need to produce a 200-300 dpi raster image of your poster. PDFs are not raster files.
To print using the PIRL HP-5000, you must have a PIRL user account. See Linda Hickcox in Sonett 214. It may take up to one working day to get your account set up.
Printing may take as long as an hour, longer if the printer is being used by others, which is often the case around conference time. Preparing your poster may take several hours, especially if you are unfamiliar with the tools.
Do not put off printing until the last moment!
PIRL offers to its users several applications that are suitable for designing and creating posters. The following four work particularly well or are particularly attractive to users.
PowerPoint is one of the most popular choices for creating a poster. It is fairly ubiquitous, available to most users who have Windows or Macintosh personal computers. Because many users use PowerPoint to create slide presentations, they are able to use familiar tools to create a reasonable poster. Indeed, since many posters evolve from slide presentations (and vice versa), much of the text and many of the figures for a poster are often already available in PowerPoint format.
Location: PowerPoint is installed on each of the PIRL Macintosh computers. There are two publicly accessible Macs: Miranda and Pandora, both of which are located in the PIRL user room, Sonett 100.
There are four steps in creating a poster with PowerPoint:
Step 1: The simplest way to use PowerPoint is to create a landscape document at 11 x 8.5 inches and design your poster at that scale. (This size is the default for creating new documents, incidentally.) When it comes time to print your poster, you will scale it up to a more appropriate size. Until you reach that stage, however, it really is much easier to work at the smaller scale. (Among other things, PowerPoint cannot create a 42-inch wide document, so you will have to scale it anyway!)
Step 2: Once you've created your scaled poster, turn it into a PDF. This process is quite simple on a Macintosh: from the File menu, choose the "Print..." command. In the resulting dialog box, click the "Save As PDF..." button. You will be prompted with a standard Macintosh Save dialog box. If you cannot see a navigable list of files, click the disclosure triangle to the right of the popup menu labeled "Where." With the full list of files, make sure the "Hide Extension" checkbox is unchecked. Give your PDF a name and save it.
Step 3: Rasterize the PDF at a larger size and resolution. On a Mac or a PC, use Adobe Photoshop to accomplish this task. (Photoshop is available to PIRL users on Miranda and Pandora, the Macs in the PIRL user room.) Start up Photoshop and use it to open your PDF. You will be prompted to provide some information about the dimensions of the image via a dialog box called "Rasterize Generic PDF Format" (or something similar to that). It is at this stage that you will scale your poster up from 11 x 8.5 inches.
In the dialog box, make sure both "Anti-Aliased" and "Constrain Proportions" are checked. Set the width to 42 inches. If you have an 11 x 8.5 inch PDF, you'll see the height automatically scale to about 32.5 inches. Set the resolution to 300 pixels per inch. ("Pixels per inch" and "dots per inch" -- dpi -- are identical units of measure for the purposes of this guide.)
Click "OK" to start the process. It may take serveral minutes to complete! Once it has completed, Use the "Trim..." command from the Image menu to trim away surrounding transparent pixels. Use the "Flatten Image" command from the Layer menu to flatten the image.
Save the image as a TIFF. An intermediate dialog box will prompt you for TIFF settings. Choose LZW compression, which is lossless, to make a smaller file. If you are given options for handling layers, cancel the process and go back to flatten the image. Byte-order options (IBM PC or Macintosh) do not matter: choose either one and don't waste your time thinking too much about your choice.
Step 4: Print the image from the command line. See below for more information.
As reasonably competitive alternatives to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and Sun's StarOffice provide presentation software similar to PowerPoint. Another attractive feature of these packages is that they run on Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD boxes. OpenOffice is also free, and StarOffice is free to educational institutions, which adds to their appeal.
In addition to a presentation module akin to PowerPoint, OpenOffice and StarOffice have a drawing module similar in nature (if not in scale) to Adobe Illustrator. This module may be useful for creating a poster as well.
Location: OpenOffice and StarOffice are installed on each of the PIRL Solaris workstations. Invoke OpenOffice from the command line with office, or invoke StarOffice from the command line with soffice. The first time you try to run these programs, they will create an installation of a collection of resource files for you.
Because OpenOffice and StarOffice are designed to be compatible with Microsoft Office, using either to create a poster is quite similar. See the notes for PowerPoint, above. There is a relevant User Note as well: Using OpenOffice to Print to the HP-5000.
Adobe Photoshop has great appeal for creating a poster, especially when the poster comprises numerous images that need to be edited in Photoshop anyway. A text tool is available within the application for placing and formatting text, although it lacks an equation editor.
Location: Photoshop is installed on Miranda and Pandora, the Macintoshes in the PIRL user room.
There are four steps in creating a poster with Photoshop:
Step 1: Create a new document that is the size of your poster. If your poster is to be 40 inches by 40 inches, make it that large in Photoshop. Set the resolution to 300 pixels per inch. ("Pixels per inch" and "dots per inch" -- dpi -- are identical units of measure for the purposes of this guide.)
Step 2: Place your images and text as needed. You will probably find it easier to type and edit your text in a separate application, such as Apple's TextEdit or Microsoft Word, than to do so within Photoshop itself. You can copy the text out of your text document and paste it into the Photoshop document easily enough.
You will probably also find it useful to use Photoshop's rulers to align text and images. If not visible, use the View menu to activate them. Photoshop also features user-created alignment guides and the ability to have one's images and text boxes snap to these guides. See the online documentation for additional help.
Step 3: Once your poster is complete, use the "Flatten Image" command from the Layer menu to flatten it. Save the image as a TIFF. An intermediate dialog box will prompt you for TIFF settings. Choose LZW compression, which is lossless, to make a smaller file. If you are given options for handling layers, cancel the process and go back to flatten the image. Byte-order options (IBM PC or Macintosh) do not matter: choose either one and don't waste your time thinking too much about your choice.
Step 4: Print the image from the command line. See below for more information.
The Gimp is an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, and it has the same sort of appeal for creating posters as Photoshop itself. It runs on Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD systems.
Location: The Gimp is installed on the PIRL Solaris workstations. Invoke it from the command line with gimp.
Because the Gimp was designed to be similar to Photoshop, using it to create a poster is quite similar. See the notes for Photoshop, above.
PIRL provides an easy-to-use command-line utility called hp-5000 that will print a raster image file to the HP-5000 printer. It works from the Macs and the Solaris boxes. In its simplest form, just give it the filename of your 300-dpi TIFF:
% hp-5000 my_poster.tif
Several options exist for customizing the output size and orientation and so forth. You can examine these options by reading the manual page or by reading the PIRL User Note on the subject: Easy Command-Line Printing to the Large-Format Printer.
(On a Mac, to use command-line programs, start the Terminal application, found in the Utilities folder of the Applications folder.)
Printing from within the application you used to create your poster seems like the easiest, most logical choice. It can be difficult to accomplish, however. The problems usually stem from having to specify a custom page size within the application's interface to the printing system.
PIRL does not recommend using this method at this time.
The following PIRL User Notes may be of use in printing a poster with PIRL's HP-5000 printer:
The following resources provide additional information about the HP-5000 printer, the print queue, and its supplies:
The University of Arizona
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 Lunar & Planetary Lab
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PIRL Webmaster | 14 May 2005 |