2007 SSM Poster Session - Poster Printing Notes

Here is some useful information regarding printing your posters.

The Physics and Geology Departments each have poster printers which can support the poster session. The SSM Dean has graciously offered to underwrite the poster printing costs for presenters from SSM. You also might consider printing your poster on a color laser printer on 8 1/2 x 11 paper, and posting the pages individually. If you choose to prepare a more formal, poster-size thing in PowerPoint and have it printed on the official Poster Printer in Physics or Geology, be advised that department personnel cannot possibly dedicate time to de-bugging problem posters, and the cost of printing is significant (say $20), so repeating a print job costs someone a lot of money.

Requirements for printing

• A completed Poster Request Form. A copy of the poster printing request form may be downloaded here
• Format: Powerpoint
• Geology printer: Max size 54" x 40" (Landscape) format works nicely.
• Physics printer: Max size 56" x 36" (Landscape) OR -- A0 (118.90 cm by 84.10 cm) format works nicely.
• PC compatible media. Bring poster data on a floppy, a Zip, CD or usb flash drive. Bring the disk to either
• Bob Nusbaum (Geology: SciC 340b),
• Chris True (Physics: SciC 105a), or

Posters take about 20 minutes to print. The amount of time it takes for your poster to come out of the printer depends greatly on how many people are ahead of you!

To head off problems... We ask that supervising professors view the poster on a computer in PowerPoint (or program as appropriate) and sign off on the Poster Request Form. Things that lead to snafus:

• overlapping frames
• complicated backgrounds
• funky fonts, especially proprietary ones not found on *all* computers
• symbols: no symbol font sets are identical and there can be some weird substitutions made by the opening computer
• OLE objects; looks nice on the computer that has the source file, but sinks like a rock on other computers

Test "printing" to a pdf file (not to a hard copy from a printer) is a good way to see if your file will print properly. Very often we have seen this result in a four-page PDF file which otherwise would have been an expensive four-page (poster) printout on the HP 800. Three of the pages in those cases contain bits and pieces, probably resulting from overlapping frames or from the use of OLE objects in the poster document.