Paper qualities
The plotter is set up with regular, matte paper, 914 mm width. Use this for your poster presentation, and for test prints.
Glossy paper is available for Department employees upon request. Note that we will collate these request and change the roll perhaps once a week. If you need glossy paper for some particular event, let us know well in advance!
Students (including PhD students) will need a recommendation (by email) from their supervisor to use glossy paper.
Make sure your poster prints satisfactory on regular paper before you go glossy!
Other printing media can also be purchased. Get in touch.
Take your time
The plotting process takes perhaps 10-20 minutes, if all goes well.
However, quite often you will need to make adjustments, or load the job differently (scaling/rotating). Sometimes the plotter will need ink replacement or other maintenance. Perhaps there is a plotting queue.
Consequently, allow at least some regular office hours for the job. Bring your laptop and a coffee mug!
Note that ink will be replaced when needed (the plotter stops), not simply because the plotter reports "low on ink".
Plotting using an USB flash drive
It is recommended to plot by copying your poster to a USB flash drive. Follow these instructions to plot from USB.
Supported formats: PDF, JPEG, TIFF, HP-GL/2, RTL and PostScript.
In our experience, it often gives the least amount of hassle to export your poster to PDF. We suggest you scale your document to the intended output size.
Some hints
Use a "clean" USB stick, with no (or few) other files on it. If the plotter won't read the stick, reformat it. Use a plain FAT filesystem (not exFAT or other modern shenanigans).
Delete all jobs from the queue before you insert your USB stick. (Conversely, if you want to reprint your poster, bring the stick again.)
If the plotter messes up the PDF, re-render it. You can do that with ghostscript on a Linux machine (possibly Mac) with the following command in the terminal, assuming your poster is in "poster.pdf" in the current directory:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=poster2.pdf poster.pdf
This creates a file "poster2.pdf" that should be visually identical to the original, but likely easier for the plotter to handle.