Southern Illinois University School of Medicine

Poster Printing Guidelines

• Poster printing for work related business is available to SIUSM faculty, residents, students and researchers whose departments have subscribed to the service. See the fee schedule for information on subscribing. Personal posters will not be printed.
• Posters are printed Monday – Friday, 8:00 AM – 4:30 PM and other times by prior arrangement.
• Posters can be sent directly to the printer queue by installing printer drivers, which are available from the Software Library. Posters can also be brought to the library on a memory stick or CD, or saved to the library’s shared server.
• Call the Reference Desk (545-2113) to let the staff know a poster has been sent to the queue and needs to be released or that you will be bringing a poster to the library for printing.
• Posters are usually printed the same day as they are submitted in the order that they are received. Please allow 24 hour turn around time in case of a large number of requests.
• Users are notified by phone when their poster is printed.
• Posters designed in PowerPoint work best with the large format printer. If other programs are used, the poster must be converted to a PDF document before printing.
• Library staff do not edit or format posters. Library staff can provide some basic suggestions on design and set up. See our poster design guide for setting up a poster in PowerPoint. See the University of Buffalo Libraries page for more information on designing effective posters
• The library does not laminate posters.
• The library maintains the printer to the highest level. If a malfunction occurs, the library is not responsible for unprinted posters.

Points to Keep in Mind When Setting up Your Poster

• The library only uses 36 inch paper rolls. Either the width or length of the poster may not exceed 36 inches. The opposite direction may be any size.
• If the poster is smaller than 36 inches the requester will need to trim the edges.
• The printer does not print to the end of the paper, so be aware that there will be a small margin.
• Different color printers print in different shades and do not always match to the computer monitor. To get the color as close as possible, go to the Large Format Printer Properties screen, under the Color tab, choose Match Color.
• PowerPoint’s maximum length is 56 inches. To get a larger poster use a scaling factor. For example, if you want a poster that is 3 feet by 6 feet, set your page setup to 18 inches by 36 inches. Before printing scale it by 200 percent. This will give a poster of 36 by 72 inches.