A0 Poster Printer

An A0 printer is available for use by DAMTP, DPMMS and Stats Lab staff and research students.

The printer is located in BL.05 and prints on bright white paper provided by DAMTP.

How to Print on the A0 Printer

A locally attached DAMTP Windows computer can be used to send print jobs to the printer. To obtain/reset your DAMTP Windows password, please email help@damtp. Document viewers like Adobe Reader are provided on the PC. DAMTP users will be able to see their Unix home directory files once logged in by looking at the N:\ drive. A desktop icon provides a shortcut to this drive. WinSCP is also available for those wishing to SSH remote files to the local pc.

Please try to be considerate of paper and ink wastage. Print proofs on A4/A3 paper first before sending print jobs to the A0 printer, thank you.

Members of DPMMS please contact your local Computer Officer to get an A0 poster printed.

Making a poster

There are many ways of making a poster. Regardless of the software used, a common technique is to make an A4 poster, and export the poster as PostScript or PDF. Print shops can then typically scale up the work to print to the desired size (check with the print shop first).

If you are comfortable with LaTeX, you may wish to use a latex style file contributed by Stephen Eglen that can also scale the poster from A4 to either A3, A2, A1 or A0. Other programmes, such as Adobe Illustrator and Powerpoint are also useful, as they provide more control on the layout of your poster.

Alternative poster printing facilities

DPMMS: A1 inkjet

DAMTP share use of a poster printer that belongs to Pure Maths.

This is an HP DesignJet 500 24 colour inkjet 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.

Please read the Using the DPMMS Poster Printer document for information about using the printer. When you think your document is ready for a trial print please email the departmental computing helpdesk and one of us will assist you in using the printer. It may only be used under supervision and no dpmms' staff are to be disturbed.

You will either need to have the document on a laptop running windows or macOSX, or we will need to transfer the document to the computer attached to the printer.

Fluids Lab: A2 inkjet

The lab has an A2 colour inkjet printer and can normally laminate A2 sheets. Things are set up so that the queues can automatically rescale PostScript to the appropriate size, but the success of this depends somewhat on the program that created the PostScript (an increasing number of applications are generating PostScript that cannot be hacked so easily). Unfortunately, the printer does not itself understand PostScript, so the PostScript has to be converted to a language the printer understands. This is done on tiki.damtp.cam.ac.uk, a machine running Windows Server 2003.

Assuming you are using Unix, then I would recommend that you produce things at A4 size and test print on spect or whichever other colour printer you have access to. (If you are using Windows, the route is a little different, but the idea of producing your poster at A4 still applies.) Once you are happy with the results, then:

     lpr -Ppenola-a4asa2 file.ps

will automatically double the (linear) size from A4 to A2 (although the structure of some PostScript makes the current filter fail to rescale correctly).

If the poster is already A2, then:

     lpr -Ppenola-asis file.ps

There are a couple of things you should note:

• 1. Only send one file at a time. The file may contain multiple pages, but if there is more than one file in the queue, things can get screwed up. You should not send a second file until the first appears in the queue on penola-raw (i.e. lpq -Ppenola-raw), which is where it will go after my machine has processed it. (DO NOT SEND ANYTHING DIRECTLY TO penola-raw unless formatted as Epson's Esc/P protocol.)
• 2. The printer has some paper handling problems and, due to its location, it does not normally have paper in it. I suggest that you arrange with Chris Mortimer, David Page-Croft or John Milton to show/help you where the paper is, how to handle the misfeeds, etc.

Chris, David or John can also show you how to use the laminator.

Printing A2 pages is slow and expensive compared with A4, so I recommend very strongly that you test print at A4, and use the rescaling queue.

Under Windows, there are currently three queues of interest:

     \\lab.damtp.cam.ac.uk\A2EpsonRaw
     \\lab.damtp.cam.ac.uk\A2PS_as_is
     \\lab.damtp.cam.ac.uk\A4PS_as_A2

The first of these queues expects Epson's Esc/P protocol, and hence is of little direct use to most users unless they are prepared to work in something other than PostScript.

The second, A2PS_as_is, accepts PostScript which it pipes the print job into GhostScript which then converts it to Esc/P before squriting it back to A2EpsonRaw.

The third, A4PS_as_A2, also accepts PostScript, but attempts (not always succussfully) to scale things up by a factor of two and thus convert a page of A4 into A2. It does this by piping the queue through a small program that searches for various bits and changes them (I cannot find a way in GhostScript to simply scale everything by a factor of 2 external to PostScript statements) to achieve the rescaling. The output of this pipe is squirted on into A2PS_as_is, and hence into A2EpsonRaw.

[Unlike the earlier version of things which used temporary files, everything now uses pipes which should allow multiple jobs to be sent at once, but no promises.]

Computing Service: PandIS, Printroom

The Photographic and Illustration Service (usually known simply as PandIS), provide large scale printing and can offer help in the graphic designs as well (for a fee).

The Illustration & Graphic Design page has a pointer to their price list. The cost of an A0 poster is 41 pounds (inc. VAT, Feb'2009). Encapsulation costs 30 pounds.

The Computing Service Printroom can be used for a variety of printing tasks (theses, large runs for lecture notes etc). The website says that they can do posters too but in fact they can only print up to A3.

Anatomy Visual Media Group

The AVMG provide A0 printing and encapsulation for 54 pounds (March 2006).