There are currently two almost*-identical Hewlett-Packard DesignJet 3500CP color plotters in the department, one called Deathstar and the other called Fluffy: both are inkjet printers which understand both Adobe Postscript (Level 3) and HP GL/2. They can print up to 54" wide and up to 150' long. The actual size of output you will be able to create will depend on the software you are using.

The plotters are located in room 304, Keith-Wiess Geology Lab (between Anderson Biology Lab and Space Science). Normal hours of access are 9am-5pm M-F. They are administered by Frank Madero whose office is in 301, is at x2522 and hemsath@rice.edu.

Access and Scheduling

The plotters are available to anyone at Rice needing the facility. We can not allow non-Rice people to print, nor can we allow the plotters to be used for personal use (i.e. anything not associated with academic work). This is due to the laws which regulate the use of equipment purchased with government research funds. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Priority of use is determined by several factors, including but not limited to:

• Department of Earth Science faculty, staff and students have top priority over other users.
• If you are signed up on the schedule in advance, you have priority over walk-in users.
• Urgency of need: people who have pressing deadlines have priority over other users.

Things to be aware of

• Large prints take a long time (1-2 hours) to make. It is not advisable to wait until the day you need something to print it.
• The plotters can be unreliable at times and you may make mistakes in design or setup. Give yourself enough slack time to deal with problems should they arise.
• Frank Madero, who takes care of the plotters, has other responsibilites. The plotters are operated as a cost center and the fees collected for printing are only to pay for supplies and maintenence, not support staff. Consequently, the plotters are a self-service facility and we cannot gauruntee that anyone's plot will eventually get printed correctly.

Papers, Pricing and Billing

There are three kinds of paper available: coated, heavy coated, and photo glossy. Coated is useful for test runs when you want the absolute cheapest option possible, but is not recommended for presentations because of its tendency to wrinkle and tear. Heavy coated is suitable for presentations and is water resistant. Photo glossy is the highest quality option, but is not water resistant. Paper comes in 36", 42", 48", and 54" rolls, so if you make one side of your poster one of those lengths (or, if you're really smart, two inches less than one of those lengths, because there is a one-inch margin into which the printers can't print), it will match up perfectly.
We charge a certain amount per square foot based on the type of paper used and the amount of ink coverage (the "class" of the plot); current charges are listed here. Most scientific presentation posters are class 2, an equal mixture of text and graphics. Note that if you have any background color other than white, though, you will be at 100% ink coverage and therefore a class 3 plot.
Billing is done most of the time through inter- and intra-department transfers, although we can accept cash and checks (payable to Rice University). You will need to know your department number (six-digit numeric, e.g. 423000) and your advisor's grant/account number (a letter followed by five numbers) in order to fill out the billing form. Sumbit the form and pay the amount specified to Denise Mayberry in room 317.

How to Print Part I

• From Unix: the lpr queues deathstar and fluffy should do it from within Earth Science, ask Mary Cochran, the ESCI Unix Sysadmin (mcc@rice.edu) for more info.
• From PCs: If you have TCP/IP printing capability, deathstar.rice.edu and fluffy.rice.edu are the addresses, and you can download the drivers from the HP website.
• From Macs (OS 9):In the chooser, in Appletalk zone Geophysics, select Laserwriter 8, look for deathstar and fluffy. You want the HP Deisgnjet 3500CP PS3 PPD, which is available from the HP website.

All that being said, there are only certain circumstances in which it is a good idea to print over the network from a Mac or a PC. The only reason that readily springs to mind is that you want to print from some program we don't have. In general, since you're going to have to come over here to make sure the printer is free, set up with the right paper, etc., you might as well just print from the PC or the Mac we have specifically reserved for the purpose. Both computers have CD-ROM drives, ZIP (100MB) drives, and network connections, so it should be easy to find some way of getting your file(s) over here.

Supported software

On the PC, we have Microsoft PowerPoint XP, Adobe Illustrator 10, Deneba Canvas 7, Adobe PageMaker 6.5, Corel PhotoDraw/Paint 10, Adobe Acrobat, and Aladdin GSView. Powerpoint is most recommended because of its ease of use and reliability.

On the Mac, we have PowerPoint 98, Illustrator 9, Photoshop, and Canvas.

How to Print Part II

1. Create your poster.
2. Come over to Geology and look at the schedule sheet (a notepad attached to a clipboard) to get an idea how busy the plotters are, and sign up for a time. If the plotters are not being used, you are free to use them immediately.
3. Follow the instructions on the wall next to the PC (or Mac) for setting up your printer/page settings in order to get correct output (and changing paper in the plotters if necessary).
4. Go ahead and print. Wait until it starts printing (very soon for PCs using the GL/2 driver, quite a bit of time for Macs and PCs using the Postscript driver) to make sure it's oriented properly. Then you wait about 30-45 minutes for the thing to print, during which time you are welcome to leave, but keep in mind you are responsible for all output, including mistakes, so if something bad starts happening and you're not there to hit "cancel", you'll end up paying for more paper than you might have otherwise.
5. Now fill out the billing form.

How to Change Paper

General pitfalls

• If your job randomly screws up, and you have it as a raw .ps PostScript file, try previewing it in PageView on your Unix box. PageView is extremely intolerant of the non-standard PostScript that other programs generate/understand, so it can tell you of one possible source of errors.
• Size and time: because of the rasterizaton process which must take place before your job can print, it can take a long, long time between when you send the data and when printing actually starts. The amount of time involved increases with the amound of graphical data being sent. We have seen some prints take five hours to get going! Don't panic and hit cancel just because it is taking a long time. One way to avoid this problem is to not send the printer more data than it can use. While HP claims 600DPI resolution, we have run tests which indicate there is no visible difference between 100 and 300 and 600DPI, and even 300DPI takes up vastly more memory than 100DPI does. So, when you put graphics into your posters, try and keep their resolutions down to reasonable levels.
• The printheads for the plotter have a limited lifetime. However, HP is very conservative in its estimation of when they need to be replaced. What you may see is that after running its diagnostics, it will tell you that a certain printhead needs to be replaced, but it will give you the option of ignoring the problem. Choose to ignore it. It will say "image quality not assured". Ignore that. If you don't like how your poster looks, we'll go from there, but we have gone for months, just hitting ignore and getting beautiful output, before the printheads have actually needed replacing.
• Consider your margins when printing. The plotters will not print edge-to-edge (full bleed), so if you set up your page to be 36"x48" and then put things right up to the borders, they will get chopped off. The best way to avoid this problem is to, when initially creating your poster, to set the page size to be two inches less on each side than the paper you want to put it on (returning to our example, make your page size 34"x46". However, if you did not do this, don't panic - you can also set the scaling to something like 90-95% (or choose 'scale to fit paper') to reduce the size of the poster and make it fit on the paper.

*Differences between the two plotters include different firmware (because they were made at different times), and more importantly that Fluffy has only 32MB of memory whereas Deathstar has 64MB, which can make a big difference when printing in Postscript mode (from a Macintosh, or from a PC using the Postscript driver as opposed to the HP GL/2 driver). It doesn't seem to make any difference when printing in GL/2 mode.