Color Printing

The GVU Center has a color postscript printer available for use:

 

The printer is located in the video lab near the window and is known to the network as rainbow.

The materials for the color printers are expensive. Heavy users will be asked to provide toner or other materials. Only HP brand transparencies are to be used in this printer.

The toner and fuser units for the printer are very expensive, thus must be quite careful in our color printing and must recover the cost of supplies from heavy users. Due to legal technicalities, we cannot charge per page nor bill users. Instead, you may be asked to provide an MSA # which we can use to purchase supplies.

Follow the procedure below to obtain color printouts:

  1. A log sheet is kept beside the color printer that contains a running account of the prints produced and by whom. EVERY COPY produced on the printer must be logged --there are no trials, no WHOOPS.
  2. Tips for printing images from the SGI machines:
    1. Images on screen are far too dark for the printer. They must be brightened significantly before they are printed, and they still come out somewhat dark. Use "gammawarp FileIn.rgb FileOut.rgb X" to brighten them, with "X" being a printer gamma value from about .4 to .6.
    2. The printer clips off a full 1" from the ends due to its paper grabbing design, but the "tocolorps" converter assumes the images will have only a 1/2" border. (Most PS printers can print up to .5 inches of the edge of the page.) Use "addframe FileIn.rgb FileOut.rgb X R G B" to add an extra border around the images, where "X" should range from about 25 to 50, and R G B being the color of the border you want around the image. (255 255 255 is fine for a white border.)
    3. Set the "Print Density" dial on the printer to about 2 or 3. Any less and the print starts to flake off, any more just gets it darker (Bad.)
    4. As with any PS images, the printer prints the image as big as it can on the page. Thus, the image should be oriented as to take advantage of the most area of the page. Use "iflip FileIn.rgb FileOut.rgb 90" to flip the image from Portrait to Landscape, or vice-versa.
    5. Use "tocolorps FileIn.rgb > FileOut.cps" located in ~ccoprrm/bin to convert the final .rgb image file into the PostScript form necessary to print.

    For PowerPoint users, just print PowerPoint to a color PostScript file, upload to gvu, and print. The Print menu has a Postscript File option; just select this and the Color/Greyscale option. You will be prompted for the name of the postscript file you wish to create.