CETL Plotter Printer

CETL has a plotter printer that will produce high quality, single page, color posters for poster conference presentations. If your discipline does conference poster presentations of research, you may have seen other colleagues with this type of poster.

We are making this printer available for use by all faculty at NO CHARGE to your department!!! Our plotter can produce posters up to 36" x 54" in full color. If you are interested in using this resource for your next conference poster presentation, we have provided instructions below for developing your poster within PowerPoint. Once you have developed your poster, you can send it as an attachment to Bill Hill (bhill@kennesaw.edu). Unless there are formating problems with your file, it will not take long to print it.

However, we ask that you submit a poster AT LEAST a week before you need it in case there are formatting problems that delay printing. We can not guarantee that a poster will be ready with less than a week's notice.

If you have any questions about this resource or the development of your poster, please contact Bill Hill (bhill@kennesaw.edu; or call ext. 6410). To-be-printed posters should be sent via e-mail attachment to Bill Hill. If requesting multiple posters at the same time, please send each poster as a separate file.

Developing Your Poster

Your poster is developed within PowerPoint. In essence, you will use a single PowerPoint slide as the "poster" by resizing the slide to the poster size you desire. Once you resize the slide, you simply add images and text. Text, however, must be entered within text boxes. The procedure for making your slide/poster is outlined below. Once you complete the steps below, save the poster and send it to Bill Hill as an attachment.

1. Open Power Point

2. Select the "Format" option and then select "Slide Layout." Once in Slide Layout, select the blank slide that is available under "Content Layout."

3. Select "File" and then select "Page Setup."
    a. Using the drop down menu for slide size, select "Custom"
    b. Set the width to your desired poster with (this will usually be either 36 or 48 inches) inches. The width can vary up to 54 inches, but must be = or > than the poster height.
    c. Set the height to no more than 36 inches, which is the maximum paper height we have available.
    d. Set the slide orientation to Landscape.

4. Entering and formatting poster content
    a. Text: Text must be entered in text boxes.
        i. Select "Insert" and then "Text Box."
        ii. Draw/place the text box into the slide. The size of the box can be adjusted as you enter text. Repeat this step for subsequent text boxes. For at 36"x48" slide, you will probably have three columns of text (i.e., three text boxes).
        iii. Once the text box is placed into the slide, select the font type and size you desire. You probably want to use a font size of at least 18 pt for easy reading.
        iv. Enter your text.
    b. Images: Select "Insert" and then "Picture." Once you have found the image that you want, select it and it will appear in the slide. You may have to resize the image. If so, follow these steps:
        i. Right click on the image and then select "Format Picture" from the menu.
        ii. Select the "Size" tab. Using the "Scale" option, adjust the percent for the height to the desired size (the width will automatically adjust itself). You may have to repeat this several times to get the desired size for your overall layout. IMPORTANT NOTE: Depending on the original image size and quality, an enlarged image may become increasingly blurred in quality. You are strongly encouraged to view the image quality at its final print size by selecting the view at 100% option in PowerPoint before submitting the slide to CETL. If you wish to use the KSU logo, this link takes you to a large format logo image.
    c. Formatting the poster: By clicking on the image or the edge of the text box, you can drag and place these items where you want them on the poster.