The large format printer is only for CS faculty, staff, students and not a general resource for all of Brown University.
The department has a color large format printer, the Canon Pro-4100, located in CIT 480 which is only opened during normal business hours ( 8:30am - 4:30pm during Fall/Spring semester and 8:00am - 4:00pm during Summer Hours). CS course or research related poster printing must be requested by a course TA or instructor by emailing problem@cs.brown.edu to ensure availablity. Scheduling a time with TStaff is highly recommended.
The maximum paper size for the clf4hq printer is a 42", with the other dimension limited only by the length of the paper remaining on the roll. A custom paper size setting, which is application specific, must be created by the user, as it is part of their environment.
Recommendations for Creating a Poster
A member of TStaff must enable the poster printer before use. To print a poster, you must login to the Mac Mini in room 480, with your CS credentials. Probably the most common applications that allow easy printout parameter tweaking are Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop. When creating a poster with any tool it is important to use the correct project dimension, pixel density and high resolution source content for the intended physical size of the resulting poster. Altneratively, vector graphics can be used, as they can usually be scaled to any size.
Large posters should have a pixel density of at least 300dpi for the base project as well as any images or other content that will be added to the poster. Scaling up a low resolution source to proportions appropriate for a large poster will result in a blurry printout.
Printing the Poster with a Desired Size
The best option for printing a roughly 16x9 aspect ratio poster is to set your custom paper size to 40" x 30". Then start with or scale up your project to match those dimensions at 300dpi (600dpi max) will likely result in a somewhat large project, but an exported jpg, png, pdf or tiff with compression turned on will help expedite the process. Larger files will take longer to transfer when the print job is started.
