The information below works for Mac OS 10.4.11 and MS Office 2004. It may work on Windows machines, but I don't know and I can't help you with a Windows machine. YMMV. If you want to give me notes on how this works on Windows machines, I'll be glad to incorporate them here and name you as a co-conspirator.
Questions, comments, corrections or suggestions to Bryan Hanson. Thanks.
General recommendations about setting up a poster and carrying out the plotting process are maintained by the Department of Geosciences and are available in the binder in the plotter room. I strongly recommend you start by reading their documents to avoid the common pitfalls. This page only deals with some practical suggestions related to using PowerPoint to prepare the poster.
PowerPoint has become sufficiently consistent across platforms that you can almost prepare your poster on either a Mac or a Windows machine. There are still a few small glitches so avoid switching platforms unless necessary, and if you must, do it on the near final version and check everything! The very last step should be to save the .ppt as a .pdf and then plot it according to Geoscience's instructions (note: Printing Services has a similar printer, you may wish to consider using their services).
OK, let's get to work...
1. Start PowerPoint and under Page Setup, choose Slides sized for Custom and specify a size of 36" x 56", with landscape orientation. Note: I tried to set the width to 60" but PowerPoint resets it down to 56". This is apparently the largest size it will accept. Use the header/footer button to turn off the headers and footers. Note: in the Page Setup box there is an Options button that is critical to the printing process. See below under Making the pdf.
2. Layout your presentation using the usual PowerPoint methods and tools (you are on your own here, but see items 3 & 4). PowerPoint does not use margins, so you must self-enforce these as you prepare your poster. Use 1" margins all around so that the physical limits of the plotter are accounted for (i.e., the plotter print head can only get so close to the edge of the paper). If you turn on rulers or the guides you can see exactly how close your material is coming to the edge.
NOTE: if you plan to display your poster at the annual poster session in November, keep in mind that the lighting in the Julian atrium at night is very poor. Dark colors will not show up like they do on the screen. Many people like to have an image of some kind as a background to the entire poster. Make sure this is not too dark or it may be difficult to view your poster. Alternatively, if you are going to have a dark image or dark color as your background, use white text on it.
3. Under Preferences, set up the default font so that all text boxes will have the font you desire in the size of the typical text you plan to use. Then you will only have to increase the font size for headings and the title. Suggestions would be Times New Roman with titles in 80 point, headings in 36 point, and main text in 28 point. Other fonts would be a little larger or smaller. Don't make your fonts too small or your poster won't be readable!
4. PowerPoint does not do columns, so the best thing to do is use text boxes for small chunks of text, so you can easily move them from place to place. So, the title, section headings, and individual paragraphs should be in separate text boxes. Of course, graphics, diagrams and photos will be separate objects too. A typical poster may have as many as 25-50 separate objects on it that each get positioned individually. Note that if you click and then shift-click you can select multiple items. Then, under Ordering in the formatting pallette, you may group them so they can be moved together, and you can align them. Also, for help in aligning objects on the poster, under View in the menu bar you may turn on the Guide, which is dotted crosshair which you can move about your workspace and use to align things visually.
5. Speaking of graphics such as photos, ChemDraw diagrams and such things: Experience indicates that it is better to have your original objects sized at about the right size for the final poster. PowerPoint does not enlarge these kinds of things well, though it does shrink them decently. For instance, if you do a standard size poster with four or five columns, and you want a ChemDraw diagram to fill the column width, then set up your original ChemDraw diagram using legal size "paper" in landscape orientation (14" wide).
6. When you create chemical structures using ChemDraw, bond lengths of about 0.4" will show up well (see document settings in ChemDraw). If you want all your structures, reaction schemes and so forth to be consistent across the poster (and of course you do), it is important that they not be consistent in ChemDraw and never re-sized in PowerPoint.
7. Things created in ChemDraw (and many other things, like photos) can be
- a) simply cut and pasted into PowerPoint or
- b) saved first as .tiff files and then inserted into PowerPoint (Insert... Picture... From File...), or
- c) saved as .png files and then inserted.
I have noticed some differences in diagram quality between these methods depending upon the platform. The .tiff method should be the most reliable way to ensure the diagram comes across correctly. However, the .tiff files from ChemDraw always have a white background. If you have a picture tiled across your entire poster as a background, try the cut and paste method, which seems to preserve transparency so your tiled background shows through the diagrams. As an alternative, the .png files definitely have a transparent background when created in ChemDraw.
8. If you have a MS Word table all prettied up and ready to go into the poster, use Insert... Object... and navigate to your Word document. Note that if the document has more than one page, only the first page is inserted. In PowerPoint, you can double-click on it to edit it (you will be transfered to Word).
Making the pdf File from a Mac...
When you are ready to make your pdf file, there are some choices to be made depending upon how you want to use the final document:
If you want to make a pdf for printing on the big plotter, while in PowerPoint go to Page Setup (where you should already see your custom paper size selected from before), and select Options. There, under settings, define a new custom paper size as 36 x 56" in landscape orientation. Note: it appears as though height and width are interchanged in this dialog box. Give your custom paper size a unique name and click Save (in the future you can access your saved settings). The printer selected is irrelevant. Be certain that your custom paper size is selected before exiting the dialog box (in some cases it doesn't seem to stick, and after being created, you have to exit the dialog box, then reenter it to select it). Go to the Print dialog box. Be sure the "Scale to fit paper" option is off. Save as pdf...
If you want a small pdf file that you can serve from a web page and which keeps its quality when you zoom in, then while in PowerPoint, go to Page Setup (where you should already see your custom paper size selected from before) and under Options, make sure the page size is 8.5 x 11". The printer selected is irrelevant. Then say OK and go to the Print dialog box. Be sure the "Scale to fit paper" option is on. Save as pdf...
By the way, any time PowerPoint gives you a warning about size and printer and blah blah blah and offers to "fix" it for you, be certain that you decline this offer!
In both cases I strongly recommend that once the pdf file is saved, open it with Acrobat and get the file info, and make sure it is really the size you intended. Do a test b/w print on a laser printer. If you laser print the big pdf (the one intended for the plotter, you will have to check "Scale to fit paper." If you laser print the small one, this will not be necessary. Each file should print out identically. If all is OK, you are ready to go to the plotter!
Final Note: if the pdf file does not print with sufficient crispness, we have had success saving the files as jpegs instead. In this case, when you do a Save as... and specify jpeg, click on the options box, and select 300 or 600 dpi as your resolution, or your poster will be slightly pixelated.
Last updated Thursday, November 5, 2009 . Contents & layout copyright 2008 Prof. Bryan Hanson