Where are the Plotters?
ETS supports three plotters: Two in the Magellan Design Studio, and one in Scott Bioengineering building room 201.
Other locations in town which may have paid plotting services include FedEx and Kinko’s.
Plotter Costs
| Printer Type | Locations | Cost | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP Designjet T795ps/T790ps plotter | Magellan Design Studio (magellan_plotter_44), Scott Bioengineering 319 (scott_plotter_44) | $0.061 per inch | ||
| HP Designjet z6100ps plotter | Magellan Design Studio (magellan_plotter_60) | $0.222 per inch | ||
Creating & Plotting Posters
You are welcome to plot on your own, but for best plotting results, we recommend that you make an appointment with one of our Student Lab Technicians to assist you or even create your plot for you.
We recommend that you read the CAT large format guidelines located at this link, prior to building your plots.
Acceptable plotting formats are in PowerPoint (.pptx) or a scaled PDF file.
Below are links to basic guides for plotting your documents.
Plotting with the 60″ plotter (Magellan Design Studio)
Plotting with a 44″ plotter (Magellan Design Studio & , Scott Bioengineering 201)
General Plotting Tips
- Preview, preview, preview! This will save you from wasting print quota.
- Don’t wait until the last minute. A successful plot can take several hours from start to finish. This does not count unsuccessful plots. During E-Days, you and everyone else are trying to plot at the same time.
- Plot during regular ETS Help Desk hours, in case you need help or there is a problem with the plotter.
- Check your print balance before you start to make sure you have enough print quota for your plot.
- If you need to purchase more print quota, you must do so at the ETS Help Desk during regular hours.
- The smaller the output file that you send to the plotter, the more reliably and faster it plots. (We suggest you keep the output file under 100 MB.)
- The higher the Print Quality you set, the slower it will plot.
- Consider converting your file to a unviersal format like a PDF document or JPEG image file to plot.
- Make an appointment with a Lab Technician.
- Please be patient, positive and prepared.
Creating a JPEG Image File For Plotting
- Choose File > Print (or whatever it takes to get to the Print dialog in your program) and select PDFCreator from the Printer Name drop down list.
- Click on Properties.
- Choose the Advanced tab. Expand Paper/Output.
- Input the Width and Height of your document (see note below) under Custom Page Size Dimensions. Select OK, OK, OK. (This will bring up a new window titled PDFCreator 0.9.8.)
- NOTE: If your image will be 60″ or less, set the Width value as the longer edge of your image. Otherwise, set the Height as the longer dimension. Set the width and height values to 0.5″ greater than the document size, to ensure that clipping or scale reduction does not occur. (For example, if your document is 30″ x 10″, make the width 30.5″ and the height 10.5″.)
- Select Options > and click Save on left side under Program > choose JPEG from the Standard save format drop down list.
- Expand Formats on the left side and select JPEG > Under Settings set Resolution to 200 dpi and set Quality to 100% > click Save on the bottom right corner.
- Under Document Title, rename the document as desired, then click Save on the bottom right corner and choose a location to save your JPEG image.
- Open the newly created JPEG in Photoshop and follow the Plotting with Photoshop instructions for the appropriate plotter.
