Due to changes within the configuration of the CS Labs that took place prior to 20071, there are no longer printers in the labs specifically set up to produce transparencies. Students who need to produce transparency masters may be able to do so using their own personal computers. Students can also look into having transparencies produced (at a cost) through services provided on campus at Crossroads HUB or off campus at one of the local office supply type stores.

Preparing color transparencies for printing in the CSL

1. Basic slide preparation

Prepare your slide using your favorite formatting tool.   The printer understands Postcript, so you need to eventually get your materials into that format.

You can do it one of two ways:

1. Install a postscript printer driver, QMS ColorScript 1000 Level 2, is a standard one you probably already have and it works well with the printer.   ftp the file to your CS account.   Proceed with the section Previewing the slides.  The potential disadvantage of this approach is that if you need to resize your slides (for example, the printer has the transparencies with the white borders loaded in it, and that covers up  some of your material), there isn't a tool to resize your Postscript image.
1. Save your slides to a file  as TIFF, GIF, or JPEG files.  ftp the file to your CS account. The printer does not understand any of these formats, and you need to convert to Postscript.  You can use xv to view them,  resize them so they fit on the page, change the orientation as necessary and convert the file to postscript..  Click here for more information on this process.
2. Previewing the slides

Use ghostview to preview the Postscript files you created in the previous step.
Cycle through steps 1 through 2 to get the slides the way you want; only then go on to the next step, printing.
 

3. Printing the slides

The tranparencies are expensive, and we have had problems in the past with students printing the wrong type of file and literally wasting boxes of transparencies.  To prevent repeats of this problem, the procedure for printing transparencies is as follows:
 

1. Display your materials with ghostview as described in the previous step.  Be sure you like what you see before you commit yourself to transparencies.  For an individual presentation, you should have at most 10-12 transparencies (and the lab assistants are aware of this number).
2. Show the screen the lab assistant on duty, who will then load transparencies in the printer for you (it is empty by default).
3. Print from ghostview, by clicking on the File menu, then selecting  Print, then type csl_xpar as the printer name.
NOTE: To print a subset of your slides, as you preview with ghostview, for each one you wish to print, type "M" (for Mark).  Then you can select Print Marked Pages in the File menu to print only the subset you want.  Try to avoid doing this extra printing by previewing your material on-line, or ask the lab assistant to print the transparencies on paper as a semi-final step.

CAUTION:  Printing takes a while, so don't plan on doing a bunch of slides a few minutes before your presentation.