Printing

Printing Guidelines for Plotters/ Printers

In order to help ensure the most efficient use of our printing and plotting environment, please adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Use the printer dialog box to verify that your print job is going to the printer that you want. We estimate that 30% of our waste is due to this problem alone. Monitor your job in your printer's queue.

   You can now monitor and delete your print jobs from the A-School computers including your personal PC or Mac (as long as your computer is in the school).

   Note: Authentication is required to access this page. If you are using a pc and Internet Explorer, type arch\ before your login-id in the User name: box. Example: arch\user.

2. When printing from Adobe Acrobat use Acrobat Reader 7 to print instead of Acrobat Professional 6 or Acrobat Reader 6. There is a programming bug in the version six of Acrobat that effect printing.
3. Use printing formats that are appropriate to your needs. A job won't print if an image attribute is wrong:
   • 16 bits per color channel is set in the Photoshop Image menu? select: Mode
   • TIF image with layers or guide marks (fix them in photoshop)
   • Too large a job (100 Mb max)
4. Do not print multiple copies of the same file when alternatives such as copier machines can provide a reasonable alternative.
5. Do not resend a job if it doesn't print right away because you may just be creating a backlog in the system. Check it in the queue.
6. Do not send black and white jobs to color printers, or small-format jobs to the plotters.

Speed Up Plot Jobs

To speed up plotting, reduce file sizes by taking into account:

• Plot jobs look good on the wall for a review at resolutions as low as 100 dpi. A color 24" x 36" image at 300 dpi is about 210 megabytes. Reducing the resolution to 100 dpi will cut the job size to 24 megabytes! [ 1/9 the size ] Chances are very good the printed job will look nearly as good.
• Plot from InDesign or Acrobat
• Print vector data (lines, CAD) rather than raster (image) whenever possible. Vector data prints much faster.
• Plotting from PhotoShop sends all pixels as image data (including white pixels). If you are compositing multiple images and text, InDesign (and PDFs exported from InDesign) are smart enough NOT to send white space as image data. This can reduce the size of line drawings or drawings with significant amounts of white space ENORMOUSLY!
• Print Black-and-White Images in Grayscale. Black-and-white images are 1/3 the size of color images. If your job has grayscale content only, change the mode in the Photoshop image menu to "Grayscale" before plotting.

Rotating Plot Jobs

There is a function of the print drivers that allows you to rotate the plotter print job on the page. By default, any print job that is sent to the plotters comes out in portrait orientation. That means that a 24x36 inch job (fairly typical) would plot with the 24 inch side taking the width of the plotter and the 36 inch side taking the length of the roll. This wastes the entire foot or more of paper to the side of the roll - completely unnecessarily. If you use the print driver option to simply rotate the job, then it would print the 36 inch side along the width of the paper and the 24 inch side on the length, making better use of the roll and not wasting paper. Unfortunately, this cannot be set to happen automatically. It must be chosen for each print job individually.

Rotating your plot job on Mac:
·plot 4fl and plot 4flb
·Plotwide printer