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The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering - Systems has a large format printer that can be used for printing posters and banners. The following are some frequently asked questions about the printing service and the policies the department follows for using the printer.
The department has a Hewlett-Packard DesignJet T1700 large format color ink-jet printer. The print quality is quite good, but not as good a devices that claim to be "photo quality" printers. The quality is usually sufficient for things like posters to be displayed at a conference poster session unless the content has detailed photographs that must be very accurately reproduced.
Anyone in the department may request to have a document printed. Signs and banners must be for events ECE-Systems is involved in, such as the annual graduation party or ice cream social. For things like conference posters, we require that the poster have at least one author listed as being a member of the ECE-Systems department. For example, we do not print posters for faculty who have joint appointments in ECE-Systems unless their association with ECE-Systems is shown on the poster.
We can provide printing service for people outside the ECE department provided they are willing to pay for the printing (see below).
The printer can not be used to print things like wallpaper for your office or other personal items unless you wish to pay for it.
For small quantities of printouts, printing is free for faculty whose primary appointment is in ECE-Systems, and for ECE-Systems students and staff. If you are running a event that requires a large amount of printing we will ask that you share in the cost of the printing by buying a roll of paper or some ink cartridges.
For people who are not part of ECE-Systems, printing can be done at a cost of
$4 per square foot of paper used. Contact Seth Scafani
(
) for details.
All printing on the printer is done by department staff. Students may request to have documents printed, but the printing will be done by the department staff.
Print requests should be sent to the staff at least 48 hours before you need to have it in your hands. This allows for the staff being available to do the printing, being in line after many other print jobs that came before yours, reprints in case there was a problem with the printer or the file, running out of ink or paper, etc. While we can often produce output much more quickly than that, you should not count on this always being possible. If you wait until just hours before you need the poster before sending the staff the data, it is very likely you will end up with nothing.
Send your file by email to Seth Scafani (
). Please do not send emails with links for
downloading the poster from some cloud service or shared drive. Sending the
file as an attachment to the email message is preferred.
Put the word "poster" somewhere in the subject line (even if it's not really a poster being printed) to make it easier to track all the printing requests. The attached file should have a name that can help to identify the owner or the event it's for. Don't name the attached file something like "poster.pdf" since there be multiple files like that being printed. In the message make sure to indicate the size that final output should be, or state that it should be printed at the size of the document (no scaling).
Printed posters will normally be left in EEB 407 in a box by the laser printer. You will be notified by email when you can pick it up.
When picking up a poster please be careful to check that you are taking just your poster and not those for other people.
PDF files are the preferred type of file for printing. Experience has shown that PDF files are the most reliable in terms of generating output that looks correct. Powerpoint files can sometimes be printed but these usually have to be converted to PDF format in order to make them printable, and the conversion process occasionally alters the content. If your document is in some form other than PDF, you are strongly advised to convert it to PDF on your own computer and check the results before sending it to the staff for printing.
The printer prints on long rolls of paper in widths of either 24, 36 or 42 inches. Documents can be printed in either portrait or landscape mode and one dimension of the output will be limited by the width of the roll of paper. The other dimension can be as long as you need however lengths above 72 inches may have printing problems due to paper skew as it feeds throught the printer. The printer can print to within about 0.1" of the sides of the paper, so the actual printable widths are 23.8, 35.8 and 41.8 inches.
Documents can be scaled up or down at the time of printing to fit the selected paper size. For this reason it is not necessary to design the document at the size it will be printed. For example, suppose you need a poster 36" wide by 48" tall produced from a document that is 8.5" by 11". This would be printed on 36" wide paper with the document scaled to a size that makes one of the dimensions reach the specified size. In this case, it would be scaled up by a factor of 4.2 to give a output sizse of 36" by 46.6".
It is not necessary to specify an output size that fills the full width of the roll of paper. For example, an 8.5 by 11 inch document needs to be printed to fit within 30 by 40 inches. This would be scaled up by a factor or 3.5 to give a 30 x 38.8 inch poster, and woud be probably printed on 42" wide paper.
The person who requests the output is responsible for trimming the printed output to the required size. In the previous example, they would get back a sheet with white space around the actual poster, which they would then have to manually cut to the 30 x 40 area they requested.
The best way to do this is to design the document to your required size and then tell us to print it without any scaling. For example if you need a sign that is exactly 20" by 30", design it to that size and we will print it with no scaling on paper larger than the designed size. In this example we would probably print it on 36" paper with a width of 22". You'll get back a 22x36 inch poster with the printed part 20x30 inches. You will have to manually trim off the whitespace around the outside.
As stated above one of the dimensions of the output will be limited by the width of the paper used: 24", 36", or 42". (For sake of discussion, call this the horizontal dimension although that might not always be the case.) The printer can not cut the paper to a shorter horizontal dimension so the paper will always come off the printer 24", 36" or 42" wide. It will usually be necessary to do trimming to get the correct horizonal size.
The vertical size of the output is set by the size of the document and after the printer has finished printing, it cuts the paper off at this point. However the printer leaves some white space on the top and bottom. If you requested a output that was 20" high, the actual output will be about 20.25" high. There will always be a extra 0.25" (33mm) of extra paper in that dimension, about half of that at the top and half at the bottom, which will have to be trimmed. If you don't mind having the white space at the top and bottom in the document, create the document 0.25" shorter than desired and after the printer cuts it off it will be very close to the size you need.
For example, suppose you need some posters made at exactly 30" by 40". Design them to be 29.75" by 40". These will be printed on 42" wide paper and the paper will be 30" by 42" when returned to you. You will still have to trim the 42" dimension down to 40" but the other dimension should be very close to the desired size and should not need trimming.
For things like signs and banners that will only be used for a short period normal bond paper is used. The quality of the output is good but the color reproduction is not great. However this paper is significantly cheaper than the others and should be used for less important output.
Most posters for use at conferences are printed on coated paper that does a better job of reproducing colors and showing a bright white background. Images are reproduced quite well but are not usually "photo quality". This is the recommended paper to use for most jobs where overall output quality is important.
We also stock some semi-gloss paper that occasionally does a better job of reproducing images than the coated paper. However on this paper the printer usually prints images with significantly more contrast that in the original images. The other problem with using this paper is that it takes several days after printing for the ink to fully dry. If you handle the output just hours after it has been printed, it is likely you will end up with smudges on the surface. Use of the semi-gloss paper is not recommended unless you really have a special need for output on this paper.
Documents that have a colored background across the entire document are strongly discouraged due to the large amount of ink they use up in the printing process. This often results in the paper being wrinkled due to all the ink that was absorted. Whenever possible, create the document with a white background. Colored backgrounds should only be use for small parts of the document such as for banners and logos across the top or bottom of the document.
The printer use a six-ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, and three blacks) printing method. We have found that it works best to create the document in the CMYK color space rather than RGB. Some programs like Adobe Illustrator give you the option when creating a new document to select the color space, and when this option is available, selecting CMYK seems to result in more accurate color rendering when printed. RGB documents will print but the colors often come out overly dark and muddy looking.
We have no fine control during the printing process over the way colors are rendered on the printer. What ever it decides to print is pretty much what you will get. Any corrections to the colors would have to be done by making adjustments in the source file.
All drafts of posters for editing purposes should be printed on regular (small) printers. The paper, ink and time cost of printing on the large format printer is too high to permit multiple drafts to be printed. Please make sure the file you send us for printing has been checked and proofread and is ready for the final printing.
Occasionally PDF files simply refuse to print due to something in the file that the software on the printer can't handle. The problems are usually associated with a graphic or image of some sort that has been imported into the document. Since this type of problem can occur, you are encouraged to follow the guidelines above for gettting the work to the staff with enough leadtime to allow you to redo the document and try to correct the problem.
Even with sufficient time to make numerous attempts to print the file occasionally files simply will not print. In these situations you will have to use an alternative printing service provider, such as Kinkos, to have the file printed.