Various programs can be used to create posters which can be printed on professional poster printers. These include, but are not limited to, Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Publisher. If you decide to print a full-sized poster, make sure you use a format and size that's supported by your printer. (Both the company/computer lab, and the actual electronic device). The recommended maximum size is an ARCH E sized sheet, which is 48"x36". You can do it either in landscape or portrait mode, although landscape tends to look better. Each of the programs above has its own strengths and weaknesses, and some are harder to use than others. So all things being equal, pick an application that you are comfortable using. PowerPoint is probably the easiest to use. For THESIS, ONLY POWERPOINT Will be accepted.

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Poster printers are precarious creatures. Not all posters are created equal, and not all posters will print equally well on the printer. Depending on the combination of fonts, colors, and objects used, such as picture formats inserted into the file, etc., they may not all print correctly. I will let you know if there's a problem with your poster. If you send me your file early, you may have time to come up with an alternative or solve the problem should any problems occur. I will start printing on Monday. Depending on how many requests I get for printing, and how many problems I run into, the deadline may be moved forward. Posters will be printed in the order that I get them in. Theoretically, a poster can be printed in about half-an-hour. But, by now, you should have all learned that in practice, we don't live in a perfect world, and experiments can and will go wrong in the lab. If everyone submits their file at the last minute, there will not be enough time to print them. Be sure that you have adequate backup plans should any problems occur. You will NOT be able to use this as an excuse to not have your poster ready by Friday at noon.

Use a font that is easily readable. Obscure fonts may add pizzaz to your poster, but they may also not print correctly; use them sparingly. DO NOT ask me to list what fonts I have installed. I probably have 200+ fonts installed, and access to more fonts, however, I will not have time to install a font just to make your poster print the way you wanted it. Most programs will substitute the font with a closely-resembling font if the other computer does not have it, so it should be okay. Nonetheless, you may save your file, take it to your school computer lab, and attempt to open it there and see if there are font disparities. If you see missing characters, missing formulas, incorrect characters, then there's a problem. Try a different font.

Color matching isn't an exact science either. What you see on screen will be pretty much what you get on paper, however, the keywords here are "pretty much." Modern CRT and LCD Monitors are capable of displaying some 4.3 million distinct colors. I'm fairly certain that the naked human eye can not distinguish between all of the possible shades. However, printers certainly can NOT print nearly as many colors. The media type in combination with the base colors of the printer's ink, wax, or toner, and how thickly each color pigment is laid onto the media, and the temperature of the press, all affects the quality and the resulting color mix you get out of the printer. DO NOT expect to get the exact shade of a certain color from the poster printer. Avoid light shades of yellows for the text, unless they're used in correct color context, they will be too hard to read and see, especially on white. They do however, make a nice background color, but not too light, it will not show up. Blue darker than Cyan will generally show up as purple.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Well it is! And so are graphs. If you are inserting a picture into your poster, be sure to resample the picture to the size you want in photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint or another bitmap editing program. Save the file as a jpg file, and then go back into your poster and insert the file. DO NOT use photoshop to copy and paste a PSD object into the poster directly. The image should be flattened before you copy and paste, but to be sure that it will work, save it as jpg and insert it. Scanned images should be scanned at 300x300 DPI or smaller resolution. Excel graphs generally can be copied and pasted into your application, but you should paste them as bitmaps, use paste special to do this. DO NOT embed the whole spreadsheet, copy just the chart object. Other applications such as SPSS generated graphs, and tables, have in the past caused problems, and may not print. If you are not using Excel, I would suggest that you print out what you need from the application you used to create it, and then scanning it into a jpg and inserting the resulting image into the poster.