The A0 Printer - HP DesignJet Z5600
This is just a rather large inkjet printer that can print A0 and A1 from a continuous roll which is slightly wider than A0: trim if necessary. The printer will cut its print from the roll itself when it has quite finished, including a pause whilst it lets the ink dry. Don't hurry it. The mechanical process of printing A0 at normal quality takes about five minutes. This will be preceded by the printer interpreting the PostScript, which can take up to half an hour (e.g. if you have complicated backgrounds), but is usually a couple of minutes. The printer is an old design, for large format printers are a low volume market and such products receive major refreshes rarely. Hence it has just 640MB of RAM, an 800MHz processor, and an internal 320GB hard disk for storing more complex rasterisations!
The printer will produce 5mm margins, but it adds these to the specified paper size to avoid cutting anything from the image. A0 is 841mm wide, so it needs paper 851mm wide to print an A0 image. Our standard paper is 36 inches, which is 914mm, so fine.
The printer's default is to render at 300dpi, but to print at 1200x600dpi (with six inks). The extra resolution on printing enables it to produce smoother colours when mixing inks.
The printer will print to paper, which it will trim when it has finished, and more expensive fabric, which it will not cut. It tends to use whichever media is loaded.
If paper needs to be loaded then please follow the instructions on the front of the printer, or ask for assistance. Many of the PhD students answering to [email protected] can help with this, and other issues with this printer.
The proper names of the two media which TCM keeps are:
HP universal instant-dry gloss photo paper (Photo paper, HP
Universal ID Photo Gloss) (Q6575A)
HP artist matte canvas (E4J55B)
There is an A0 trimmer in Room 523. This will cut both paper and fabric. There should also be a pair of dressmakers' scissors for cutting the fabric from the printer. When cutting fabric from the printer, one may need to ask the printer to advance the paper a little. The well-hidden menu item for this can be found with home, information (top left), tools (spanner, bottom right), paper (the menu will scroll if stroked), move paper, and hold down advance.
Alternatives
The Physics Dept closed its A0 printing service in January 2017. However, many other Departments do offer A0 printing, including Maths and Engineering, and so does the UIS Printroom, which is on the West Cambridge site. The services of the Anatomy Visual Media Group on the Downing Site are also available to the whole University: AVMG.
Local commercial printers also exist.
Transporting Posters
Posters printed on fabric can be folded and put into a suitcase. It tends not to crease. It is unclear whether it would surive a cool iron if one feels enthusiastic. The official specification states a maximum temperature of just 30°C, and a life of one year before printing, but up to 200 years after printing. I am not sure how much I believe this.
Posters printed on paper need to be transported rolled. There are two alternatives. TCM has two plastic poster tubes. These are ideal, but need to be returned. Otherwise one can use the box, or the inner cardboard roll, of an old roll of paper or fabric. The inner roll is smaller, but may produce a slightly curled poster. These can be regarded as disposable, meaning that you can consider throwing them, and the poster, away at the end of a remote conference, and not having to bother with them on the return journey. You can then print a fresh copy in TCM to put on the the corridor walls.
Printing PDF
Generally PDF prints fine from evince or okular. One can also print directly from a USB memory stick.
Printing PostScript
This should also work seamlessly. One advantage of PostScript is that it is human-editable, so if things need tweaking, they can be tweaked.
If one needs to try manual conversion of PDF to PostScript, then pdf2ps is the best answer.
To use pdf2ps it is best to add the option -dCompressPages=false will reduce the processor and memory requirements for the printer, and will make the file easier to edit. You will have to edit the resulting file, as pdf2ps omits any media selection. So, for an A0 printout,
$ pdf2ps -dCompressPages=false poster.pdf
then edit poster.ps to prepend
%!
<< /PageSize [2380 3366] >> setpagedevice
/setpagedevice {pop} def
If one needs to specify a rotation from landscape to portrait, then
90 rotate 0 -2380 translate
after the two setpagedevice lines might suffice. In this case it is a very good idea to view the result with gv, and to set the papersize explicitly to A0 from gv's menus (as the boundingbox information will now be wrong, and is always ignored by printers anyway.)
Once converted to PostScript, the file can be printed directly from the command line, like any other PostScript file:
$ lpr -Ppsca0 -o raw poster.ps
and its (slow) progress can be monitored with
$ lpq -Ppsca0
Printing Images
Gimp works fine: in the print dialog box choose psca0, in the page setup tab choose a suitable paper size (e.g. A1 landscape), and then in the image settings tab a suitable resolution. As the hardware resolution is 600dpi, one might wish to bias one's answer to submultiples of this (600, 300, 200, 150, 120, 100 or 75).
Resizing PostScript
One can try resizing PostScript by prepending something like the following to a Postscript job. The setpagedevice command selects the output media size, and the scale command rescales appropriately. It is possible that this will fail, but it should work in most cases. Note that the page size is determined by the setpagedevice command, and not by the %%BoundingBox comment. The default page size is A4, to avoid wasting large amounts of paper when rubbish is sent to the printer.
%!
<< /PageSize [841 1190] >> setpagedevice % [841 1190] A3
% [595 842] A4
% [1683 2380] A1
% [2380 3366] A0
/setpagedevice {pop} def % ensure no further setpagedevice commands
% can be effective
0.125 sqrt dup scale % 0.0625 A0->A4
% 0.125 A0->A3 A1->A4
% 0.25 A1->A3 A2->A4
% 0.5 A2->A3 A3->A4
% 2 A4->A3
% 4 A3->A1
% 8 A4->A1 A3->A0
% 16 A4->A0
When checking this in gv, it will be necessary to set the page size explicitly in gv -- gv will read a BoundingBox comment if it can find one, and obey it. No printer does this.
Paper sizes
ISO paper sizes are:
A0 841 mm x 1189 mm 2380 pt x 3366 pt A1 594 mm x 841 mm 1683 pt x 2380 pt A2 420 mm x 594 mm 1190 pt x 1683 pt A3 297 mm x 420 mm 842 pt x 1190 pt A4 210 mm x 297 mm 595 pt x 842 pt A5 149 mm x 210 mm 420 pt x 595 pt
(Yes, A0 expressed in mm is about the same as A3 expressed in points. The point is 1/72 inches, and the millimetric is about sqrt(8) points.)
To convert from An to Bn paper sizes, multiply each dimension by the fourth root of two (1.189).
To convert from An to Cn paper sizes, multiply each dimension by the eighth root of two (1.091).
The paper rolls are three feet wide (915mm, 2592pt), so one might manage C0, but certainly not B0. Oversized A0, in so far as it is defined at all, is 860mm x 1220mm, and is intended to be A0 with a margin for trimming. As the paper is roll-fed, the length can, in theory, be very long indeed.
Very large/complex prints
The printer can also accept jobs in the form of compressed bitmaps, using HP's own Raster Transfer Language. Using this was often necessary with our old DesignJet 1050Plus, and it might still be useful for some specialist prints. So we keep our old page on A0 printing by rasterisation.