problem scaling in powerpoint for large poster

[Guest]

in order to print a 36'x84' poster, we made a 18'x42' one and scaled 200%
while printing on a HP 3500CP plotter. (as suggested on many webpages)

HP 3500CP has a postscript driver which enables "printed to file" so as to
be (pre-)viewed.

The problem is that powerpoint didn't print (to file) correctly. Seem that
the page size was still limited to 56'

The same plotter setting was used for openoffice's impress's printout of the
same poster. It gave the correct results though.

thanks in advance

 

[Sonia]

See:

Print posters or other large format output
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00537.htm
--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

 

[Guest]

Hi,
Thank you very much for the reply.

Now I post our ordeal of making PowerPoint print large poster.

First of all, we just bought a used plotter HP-3500CP, which comes with two
device drivers: postscript3 and HP-GL2 (i guess). We like to print into the
postscript file first so as to preview the printout (by GSView or Distill).

This time when we need to create a poster larger than 56' in one dimension.
So as suggested by many links on the web (which we are very grateful), we
design our poster to be half the size and then scale it by 200% while
printing.

(18'x42' was the original size. we hope to scale it to 36'x84')

Now the problem is that the postscript printout didn't turn out to be
correct. All the images and text boxes seemed to be crowded and overlaid
within 36'x56' area with the extra space totally blank.

However yesterday I finally found a HP-GL2 preview. I followed the same
steps and settings and PowerPoint do get printout extended to the whole
36'x84' area. Though there are few glitches as some black boxes in the figure
legend, etc., it is much better than the postscript output.

Lessons learned:
(1) it is always good to have a previewer and do a preview before printout.
It save lots of tree and ink and waiting time on the plotter;

(2) PowerPoint can't print correctly by HP-3500CP postscript driver (PS3)
while scaling over 56' in one dimension; OpenOffice Impress can

(3) PowerPoint can extend over 56' by printing in the other (HP-GL2) driver.

(4) Even though both PowerPoint and Impress can print large poster, there
may still be glitches in it, such as cropped image, textbox overlay on image,
black out in some figure legend, etc. Some problems, we believe, are caused
by incorrect page margin observation. Others we haven't figured out. However
go to point (1).

If you need my demonstration files (powerpoint) or have better solution to
the problem, please email me at (e-mail address removed)

Sincerely,
Hu Zhe