BISS/ITG Printing Information

Our goal with this section of the ITG website is to provide users of the Beckman Institute's printing facilities easy access to information on how to configure their computers correctly to print to the Institute's printers, how to install the necessary color profiles for accurate color reproduction, and how to print from various applications with the assurance that the print will appear as desired.

Please check the various categories below for information specific to the printer in question.

Printer Installation Tools

The following tools will install/remove the currently active BISS public printers from Windows 2000/XP systems. They are especially useful for systems with multiple users as the installer will make the printer available to all accounts on the system.

instprinters.bat	28 February 2005	Installs printers: bw2, bw3, bw4, color2, color3, color4, photo4-1, photo4-2, poster. Usage: instprinters.bat
mkprinter.bat	28 February 2005	Use this tool to specify a specific \\bi-printhost\ printer name (for printers not in the list above). Usage: mkprinter.bat <printername>
rmprinter.bat	28 February 2005	Removes a specific \\bi-printhost\ printer from your system. Usage: rmprinter.bat <printername>
uninstprinters.bat	28 February 2005	Uninstalls \\bi-printhost\ printers: bw2, bw3, bw4, color2, color3, color4, photo4-1, photo4-2, poster. Usage: uninstprinters.bat

Save these batch files to your local hard drive and run them from a DOS command prompt. Administrator rights are needed to install printers using these utilities. Also, the Administrator must logout before these printers will show up in the list of available printers.

Windows presents some initial delay in displaying these printers after installation (and the logout/login procedure). This delay should happen only once. After that, the printers should show up for all users of that given system.

Printer Profiles

ICC color profiles are used by applications to ensure that the color that is reproduced on printed page closely matches known color standards. If the monitor on the computer being used is also calibrated, the print should match closely with the display. To install a color profile, download the profiles for the printers listed below and follow the instructions for your particular operating system.

Beckman Printer Profiles (color2, color3, and photo-4-2 coming)
ITG Printer Profiles (Used by ITG Staff Only)

Poster Printing

Before beginning work on a poster to be printed on the wide format printer, please be aware that neither the ITG nor BISS recommends the use of Microsoft PowerPoint® for creating posters. Please review the Poster Printing ITG Forum as presented on the 14th of September 2004 for our recommendation:

Poster Printing & Design (full color, one slide per page)
Poster Printing & Design (full color, two slides per page)
Poster Printing & Design (grayscale, with notes suitable for printing)
The ITG Forum Archive for 2004-09-14

Having reviewed the poster printing forum, it should be clear that PowerPoint is not the best choice for printing to the poster printer. That said, it may be too late - the poster may already be designed. To help this unfortunate situation, please read the following documentation.

The powerpoint to pdf guides (below) describe the procedure for converting a PowerPoint poster into a PDF document and offers some suggestions for how to do so without too severe of a loss of quality. (Do not design new posters using PowerPoint! Please read the ITG Forum notes above.) BISS recommends converting all PowerPoint documents - no matter the size - into PDF before printing. These instructions are applicable for any paper size, though the emphasis is on larger sizes.

Print Resolution Reduction Method

Export Resize Method

Printing from Acrobat 8

These instructions detail how to print a poster contained within a PDF file to the poster printer in the Beckman Institute. The document was written as a follow-on to the PowerPoint conversion process but is applicable to all PDF documents regardless of size.

Printing Posters from Adobe Acrobat 8 for Windows XP

Problems Creating Arbitrary Page Sizes?

Non-administrator users may experience problems creating arbitrary page sizes under Windows XP. The following eight step procedure should fix the problem.

3d Printing

ITG has two identical z406 3D printers for solid object creation. The printers are available for all University students, faculty, and staff. The printers have lots of uses, like protoyping, making scientific models (like a rat's visual cortex or chemical structure), architecture models, and more. Click here for more infomation on the ITG 3D printers.