Chemistry Poster Printer Step-3

Create Poster

Be advised that the Chemistry Department IT is unable to assist with the design of your poster. We are to assist with the printing of your poster, selecting the proper paper size and such.

The recommended size for you poster is 36" high by 48" wide, landscape format. The paper on the poster printer is 36 " wide, put the maximum printable dimension around 35 ". The height can vary, but you will be charged by the inch.

The IT Group is not able to support every photo application that is out there. Currently we are only able to assist people with setting up PowerPoint. We have had some success with other programs for printing, but you are on your own for support. If demand calls we might be able to add more supported programs in the future.

Below are some tips from the Undergraduate Studies office:

  1. Font size should be 24 to 28 point.
  2. Pictures of people or apparatus can be taken with a digital camera; files are jpg's.
  3. Structures can be drawn in ChemDraw or Isisdraw and copy/pasted into PowerPoint.  They can be stretched to an appropriate size and seem to come out fine.
  4. The PowerPoint Insert menu selection lets you insert pictures (jpg's, tif's and gif"s) from files and objects (Excel spreadsheets or workbooks, charts, etc.) and these can be resized too.
  5. Before you print your poster, print an 8.5 x 11" proof copy on a laser printer or color inkjet printer.  Change General to PowerPoint if necessary and check "Scale to fit paper" and landscape.
  6. While your poster may look good on your computer screen, that does not mean the poster will look good once printed 300% larger. Small graphics from files like .gif and .jpeg generally do not scale well.  If you copy a picture from a web page to put on a poster, there's a good chance it's going to look "chunky" when you scale it up.
  7. Watch your image resolution!  In a nutshell, if you have photos/images in your poster, they can take up large chunks of space. A good rule of thumb is: "Scan in high, print low(er)".  If you have a photo/image you want to put in your poster, a good recommendation is to:
    • Scan the image at something around 300 DPI.
    • Scale your image up to "life size" for the poster (e.g. your image starts out as 3" x 5" but you want to use a small portion of that image and you want that small portion to be 6" x 10" in size. Scale and crop the image so that the smaller section is IS 8" x 10")
    • Reduce the image resolution to 72 DPI.
  8. As long as you don't scale the image any more after doing this, it will print perfectly well.  The 300dpi image is going to try and lay down more ink in the same area as a 72dpi image.  Sometimes this can actually "muddy" the image, or make it overly dark.  It will also save you a lot of file space, and print faster because there's less of the image for the plotter to parse.  From 6 to 10 feet away, no one is going to notice the difference, either!
  9. Try to stick to the “standard fonts”:  Others may look cool, but may not be in the poster printer’s retinue and will get substituted with something that will make your letter spacing be uneven.
      • Here are the standard fonts:
        • Arial
        • Arial Bold 
        • Arial Oblique 
        • Arial Bold Oblique 
        • Comic Sans MS
        • Courier 
        • Courier Bold 
        • Courier Italic 
        • Courier Bold Italic 
        • Helvetica 
        • Helvetica Bold 
        • Helvetica Oblique 
        • Helvetica Bold Oblique 
        • Times 
        • Times Bold 
        • Times Italic 
        • Times Bold Italic 
        • Symbol


On to Step 4

Back to Poster Printer

The Pennsylvania State University Chemistry Department Helpdesk