Prepare a large banner

[camelot217]

I do not do much large size printing so I'll ask here before I make a fool out of myslef talking to the printers ;-). I have banner that is 16ft x 2ft. What is the best approach/requirements to prepare this for printing? It mostly consist shapes and fonts. I saw another tread but it was dealing with much smaller size.

I also have a billboard size coming up soon.

Thanks i advance.

Tom

[Tao jones]

Hi Tom, these are snippets I have picked up from posts on the same subject...tao



Hi I own a sign shop and use Xara X1 and Xtreme all the time, heres a hint to create a large banner, make a rectangle any size convert it to shape, place your graphics in front of the banner select all, and resize proportionately at the top with the measurement box, size limitation is no problem.

Also no need to change page size, just move off the white area of the screen onto the grey part, you can even save out as a 16 bit tiff, depending on the size, I have saved 11x17 at 600 dpi, and up to 188.5 inches at 100 dpi.

Hope this helps, also I have alot of memory approximately 3 gig, with windows 2k pro, on boot 2800 meg physical ram.
Reply With Quote

We've produced large posters, and have just produced some A0 size just this week (not as large as yours). One safe way is to produce a very large TIFF or PNG file. That way you are guaranteed the fonts will be correct and there will be no issues with things like transparency that can upset some PDF readers (PDF would be the other recommended way of outputting the files).

If you do this it doesn't really matter that the page you're creating is really 3m x 1m, just that it's the correct proportions. So you could have a page 30cm by 10cm and then export that as a hi-resolution PNG or TIFF file.

The key restriction to know is that Xara can produce bitmaps up to about 16,000 pixel wide or tall. This is more than enough for just about any sized poster. 3m is about 118 inches, so if you exported a bitmap that was 16,000 pixels wide that would be equivalent to about 130 dpi, which is way more resolution that you'd require for a poster (they could come up to the poster and look with a magnifying glass to see the pixels).

When exporting a TIFF file it defaults to only outputting the region that contains any graphics, rather than the whole page. To solve this, draw an invisible rectangle around the outside of the page (no fill or line color), and make sure it's selected before you export as TIFF. That way it will export the correct size. When exporting PNG images you have more controls and can select to save the whole page, drawing or selection.

Your printer should be able to take PNG or TIFF, unless they are living in the dark ages and might only accept TIFF. When exporting make you sure select 24 bits per pixel for TIFF and True Color for PNG export.

So the steps to produce a successful poster
• Get the paper proportions right size right. It doesn't need to be the full size. So instead of having a page size of 3m x 1m, create a page 30cm x 10cm.
• If exporting as TIFF, create an invisible rectangle around the outside of the area you want to print and make sure it's selected before you export.
• Select File -> Export and select TIFF or PNG file types.
• Set the width or height to be 16,000 pixels if you want maximum resolution (you only need to set the width or the height, not both as it calculates the other value for you). You will see the dpi figure change, but you can ignore this.
• Make sure you've selected a color depth of 24 bits-per-pixel or True Color
• Select Export
• You can preview the file in Windows Picture Viewer to check it's OK (although be aware the images as large as 16,000 pixel are sometimes beyond what the Picture Viewer can cope with)
• Burn file to CD and send to printers.

If producing images of 16,000 pixels wide be aware that you will tyoically be producing files of 100 Megapixels, or more, and so this will produce quite large files.

n the gif export options try selecting Error Diffusion for the Dithering
Reply With Quote

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=22869 resize large images


As long as your proportions are correct, just export your PDF file and let the printing company scale the poster.

Keep in mind however that if your poster included photos, that the resolution also needs to be scaled.

So if your printing company needs your bitmaps at 300dpi and your file is at 25% actual size then you will need to increase the resolution of your bitmaps accordingly, or 1200dpi in this case.