Large Format Plotter (Cplot1)

cplot1 is a large-format, Inkjet, 2400 x 1200 max dpi color printer which is available to the UCSD community on a fee-for-service (recharge) basis.

This Hewlett-Packard DesignJet T1100ps is capable of printing images 42 inches wide and theoretically up to 150 feet long. Various output media are available including draft quality paper, vellum, and photo-grade papers.

Pickup:

Weekdays: 8:00am to 4:30pm
ACMS Help Desk
Applied Physics & Mathematics (AP&M) Room 1313

Weekends: Please call 858-534-4097 to pick up
ACMS Computer Operations Room
Applied Physics & Mathematics (AP&M) Room 1426

cplot1 is unlike any other printer that ACMS offers. Even if you are already familiar with fee-for-service printing on ACMS laser printers, please read the instructions carefully including the level of support offered, costs, media options, procedures for submitting jobs to the printer and hints for better output.

Service expectations

CPLOT1 printing is an auxiliary service of ACMS. The CPLOT1 fees are minimal, but so too are the levels of technical support and staffing to process jobs. CPLOT1 fees recover the cost of materials only.

To keep cplot1 fees to a minimum, technical support is limited to the written instructions provided on this webpage. Likewise the speed of job turnaround is not guaranteed. Computer room Operators run cplot1 jobs when time is available. Occasionally other duties take Operators away from the computer room thus preventing quick turnaround on cplot1 jobs.

Due to the limited technical support and uncertainties of job turnaround time we do not recommend using the cplot1 printer if you have a tight deadline, particularly if this is the first time you will be using the printer. Better options include Imprints (on campus) or a commercial printing company or copy store (e.g. Kinko's) that have staff standing by to process jobs and assist you in troublshooting document set-up errors.

For UCSD students working in ACMS computer labs, the computers are preloaded with the necessary printer driver and PPD files, and there are "login" utilities that assist students in making the network connections to the ACMS print job spooling system.  UCSD affiliates working from other on campus locations will need to load driver files, establish printing network connections and make proper page set-up settings. It is not uncommon for it to take a few days to become familiar with all the logistical details necessary to print large jobs, properly scaled and properly positioned on cplot1.

How to pay

Students:

You will need a real money Laser Printing account, which can be set-up through the ACMS web site. You will also need to explicitly configure your Laser account to allow premium-printing access.

Recharge/Staff/Faculty:

Recharge account users will need to contact the ACMS Business Office to establish an ACMS printing account. This will involve having access to an index number, as well as about 24 hours to set-up the account. Please take this turn around time into consideration if you will need to establish a new account.

Media Options

There are several types of media available for cplot1 output:

How do I determine cost and preview my jobs?

Cplot1 uses a unique pricing structure based on ink and paper used. Please use the no-print queue (Cplot1_np) to get an accurate estimate and see a preview of your poster.

The printer requires a 1/2" margin around your print area so you need to allow for this before sending your job to the "non-printing" queue.

E-mail Note: The report is e-mailed to the account you use to submit the print job. For departmental users (see above), this is the recharge account you established to use cplot1, not your UCSD e-mail address.

Ink Cost

There is an ink usage charge for each of the four ink colors cyan, megenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). The cost for full-coverage is $0.75 per sq. ft. per color C/M/Y/K.

Secondary colors (such as green) use more than one ink color and cost more. When Gloss Photo paper is used the printer mixes black from C/M/Y inks instead of using its black ink cartridge. The accounting script adjusts ink charges accordingly.

Paper Cost

The charge for paper is by the linear foot depending on the chosen media. See Media Options for more details.

(Be aware that this pricing is subject to change without prior notice.  The email from the non-printing preview queue will always contain an accurate price.)

Protective Mailing Tubes

When you pick up your job, you may purchase a cardboard mailing tube for your output. The price is $4.00 per tube, which will be added to the cost of your job. If you already have a tube, please bring it in and re-use it!

Cplot1- PPD supported page sizes

The PPD file for cplot1 supports many different document page sizes. See the list of supported page sizes.

Check or remove jobs from print queue

Print Queue Management Utility shows list of your print jobs, along with information about how many other jobs will print before yours and also have the option that allows you to delete your jobs from the queue.

CPLOT1 Print Queue Check shows your print jobs in the queue, job completion status, print job start/end time and a thumbnail of your poster.

Hints on getting best results

An important factor in successfully printing on the cplot1 printer is avoiding failures that occur if your job file is too large to transmit or store in print job spooling area(s). How large is too large? That varies depending on the route your job must follow from your ACMS server to the print spool area on ieng9 which is the host that currently drives the printer. It also depends on traffic to the spool area(s) en route. Under the best circumstances (if you have direct access to ieng9) it probably is not wise to exceed 300 megabytes. Large jobs can run the spooling areas on servers out of space. In which case they will be removed (largest first) in order to maintain print service for ordinary jobs.

There are various ways you can reduce the size of your job files.

Use vector graphics ("draw") applications instead of raster graphics ("paint") applications. For example, Adobe Illustrator produces high quality signs and posters consisting of text and color areas (vector graphics). The size of Illustrator print jobs is small compared to raster graphics jobs of the same dimensions. Typical 30 x 42 inch posters have been created in Illustrator where the resulting PostScript file size was only 128 kilobytes. Vector graphics documents convert to PostScript very efficiently. The amount of text has little effect on the job size. Also the output resolution, in the case of vector graphics, is not critical. In Illustrator switching between 100 and 800 dpi does not change the job size appreciably. This is because the PostScript for vector graphics describes shapes of text and color areas in terms of geometric vectors, the printer builds the pixel by pixel bitmap of the finished image internally.

If you use raster graphics ("paint") applications such as Photoshop, the PostScript job file contains a pixel by pixel bitmap of the image. The file size can quickly get out of hand as the dimensions and resolution of the bitmap increase. Control the file size by reducing dimensions, resolution, and bit-depth. Reducing the dimensions and resolution reduces the number of pixels in your file. Reducing the color bit-depth reduces the amount of data per pixel.

The raster graphic's file size is not equal to PostScript job's file size. A 36"x 36", 300 dpi raster graphic of a square can be compressed by saving the file as a JPG or GIF to only a few hundred kilobytes. However, when the graphic is printed the PostScript job has a file size of over 250 megabytes. It is generally not a good idea to print jobs that includes raster graphics with a dpi greater then 300, even though the printer can print at a much higher resolution.

If you need to produce a large format piece such as poster that contains a mixture of text and color areas (vector graphics) and a few raster graphics images, consider using a vector graphics ("drawing") application for the major text and color areas of your poster. Leave space for raster graphics (e.g. Photoshop images) and attach them later.

Solutions to common problems

Symptom: Remote printing is not working.

OS X

• Going to the ppd file with a browser shows a bunch of text, it does not download. You have to instead "Save As" in to /Library/Printers/PPDs.
• Make sure set the document size and the paper size.
• Make sure to set to LPD printing not IP printing.

Windows

• Make sure to unpack the driver installer before running it.
• Make sure to choose the "download as soft font" option.

Both

• Make sure to use the preview queue.
• Do not make the width other than 36 or 42.

Symptom: Document with gradient background fails to print. More specifically, a Microsoft Powerpoint job that has a gradient background is submitted to cplot1 and either the background does not print or you receive an E-mail report that says, "Note: Your PostScript job aborted or otherwise did not process properly. Please contact ACMS User Services ( acms-consult@ucsd.edu , (858) 534 4060 ) for assistance."

Diagnosis: Large gradient areas, particularly Powerpoint backgrounds, are known to fail on the cplot1 plotter. Looking through the error logs on ieng9, you may see something like:

 GS Message: Error: /undefined in errordi^Tct

	GS Message: Operand stack:

	GS Message: 

	GS Message: Execution stack:

	GS Message: %interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval--

			 --nostringval-- --nostringval--

	2 %stopped_push --nostringval--

			 --nostringval-- --nostringval--

	 false

	1 %stopped_push 1 3 %oparray_pop

	.runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval--

		 --nostringval-- 

	2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval--

				 --nostringval--

	GS Message: Dictionary stack:

	GS Message: --dict:931/983(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)--

			 --dict:81/200(L)--

	GS Message: Current allocation mode is local

	GS Message: Current file position is 4048

	

Solution: Replace all gradient backgrounds in Powerpoint with single color backgrounds. (zz1kc)

(02/12/03)
Symptom: The cplot1_np preview of a PowerPoint document indicates a letter-sized image and does not show the whole document.

Diagnosis: The preview is showing an accurate indication of what would print. In this case, the job sent to cplot1_np contained a specification for a page size of "letter" rather than for a custom page size. The most likely reason for this is that it's not enough that you specify a page size in PowerPoint; in addition, you need to pick one of the page sizes known for that particular device (HP DesignJet 1100PS).

Solution: Click on the "Properties" button in the window which appears when you select "Print..." from PowerPoint's File menu. (Be sure that the "Name:" shows "HP DesignJet 1100PS", so you'll get the right list of properties. Look at "Paper Size:"; it probably says Letter now. Pick the size you want from the list or pick the PostScript custom Page Size item from that list.

Once you've done this, the thumbnail you get back should reflect the choice you made instead of the default "letter".

(09/24/03)
Symptom: The cplot1_np preview of a TEX document indicates a letter-sized image.

Diagnosis: Special directives are required to increase (or override) the default TEX output size which is letter-size.

Suggestions: Look for TEX (LaTEX, teTEX) documentation concerning increasing the output size, for example look for notes about "poster.cls". Use those instructions to generate your DVI file. Use the dvips utility that is part of TeTEX on ACMS systems to convert your DVI file to PostScript. This dvips is configured to respond to the HSIZE and VSIZE values and set the height and width of the PostScript encoded file accordingly.

Alternatively, look for the "poster" program by Jos van Eijndhoven. This has not been tested locally, but it's described as a utility to resize an encapsulated (or single page) postscript image to print on larger media.

Yet another alternative, here's a suggestion from a UCSD student:

For latex, I had a style file from http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~awf/latex-posters/ provided by Andrew Fitzgibbon. For dvi -> ps, I used:

dvips -P a0 -Ppdf -G0 filename.

You were also right about the ps/eps issue, the ps printed fine, but the eps did not, nor did printing through ghostview work. It appears plain command line printing [using lpr] is the best option.

If you successfully use one of these methods, the thumbnail you get back should reflect your chosen output size instead of the default "letter".

(02/12/03)
Symptom: Problem opening files, e.g. Microsoft PowerPoint says that file does not exist.

Diagnosis: Microsoft Office applications (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Publisher, etc.) on the Macintosh have trouble opening files from a network folder. If you see your file, but Microsoft PowerPoint insists that the file does not exist, then you must copy the file to your desktop and open it from there.

Solution: Make a local copy of your file by dragging it from your network folder to the desktop. Open the copy on your desktop for editing (Microsoft applications should not complain now). If you've made modifications, be sure to save the file and copy it back to your network folder.

(09/30/03)
Symptom: Windows Powerpoint landscape poster using custom page size prints in portrait mode instead of landscape mode.

Diagnosis: Custom Page Setup screen's "width" is the paper's width, not the width of the (landscape) poster.

Solution: The width and height of the custom page size should be thought of with you standing behind the printer watching the paper come out: The width is the width of the actual paper, e.g. up to 42 inches, and the height is how much paper will unroll, e.g. 56 inches.

(10/23/09)
Symptom: Recharge account using an ACMS lab print job does not go through

Diagnosis: Recharge account holders cannot print directly to the printer

Solution: Please use the remote printing authorization page to log into one of the Cplot1 Printers. Please see Media Options for more information on which printer is appropriate for your poster.