poster : Java Glossary

Introduction

It would be nice to have at least the first 255 chars of Unicode on a wall chart showing glyph, decimal and hex. I don’t know where to buy such a chart. However, I could produce such a chart in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), then convert it to PDF (Portable Document Format), then send it to a custom poster printer.

Custom Posters

All kinds of companies will print a custom poster for you. All you have to do is upload a file online, usually *.jpg or *.pdf.

Before you upload, figure out the ratio of width to height of the paper they will use and adjust your image to fit that same ratio either by some combination of cropping, stretching and/or squeezing. Don’t count on the printer adjusting your image the way you would.

The advantage of a local printer is you get the poster the next day and you avoid shipping charges. You can also walk into his shop with your image on CD and pay by debit card, cash or other forms of payment he might not take over the Internet and perhaps even get your poster immediately. When I took my DVD (Digital Video Disc) into Staples, it took 5 minutes to order and 15 minutes to wait for the ink to dry. Another advantage of a local printer is you can order any conceivable size. This will probably save you money since you essentially pay by the square foot for paper and ink.

When I first saw my finished poster, I thought they had laminated it with a plastic film, or printed it on plastic. It had a plastic feel. The clerk explained it was printed on a glossy photographic style paper. Because it was a PDF, when it was enlarged, the type became even more crisp than on the original. It is flawless, except for one tiny scratch that blurred one letter. I mounted it firmly and elegantly to a wooden cabinet with small pieces of double-sided sticky foam tape. I am tickled pink. Every IntelliJ user needs one of these posters.

I discovered that poster printing equipment is capable of full bleed — printing right to the edges with no margins.

The PosterJack people in Canada take PayPal and produce custom posters in many sizes from uploaded gif or jpg images but not pdf. If you upload a high resolution digital camera image, you will get a high-res poster comparable to a commercial non-custom poster. If you upload a low-res point and shoot image, the PosterJack people will mathematically blow it up, using interpolation. The image will not be jagged, but it won’t be as sharp.

The PosterBurner people in the USA take PayPal and handle almost all formats including pdf.

Prices

Here are approximate prices for one 18 × 20 poster. Taxes and shipping are not included.

Custom Poster Printing Prices

Custom Poster Printing Prices
Country	Provider	Price
	Staples
	Staples
	PosterJack
	PosterBurner

Poster Printing Services

Poster and Cheat Sheet Candidates

Here are candidates for free downloadable documents you might either print out on your own printer or take take to a printer to be blown up as posters:

If you find other useful candidates on any topic, please let me know.

Most of the time, it is legal to take other people’s cheat sheets and modify them to create one that suits you. You might use Omnipage to extract the text, or FastStone to extract graphics and put it back together in a word processor or in an HTML editor, then convert it to PDF. Quite often cheat sheets have padding whose real estate could be put to better use.

Laminating

The problem with posters is there is limited vertical space near your desk where you can read the poster from your chair. The alternative is to print out posters on ordinary paper and take them to your local print shop to get them laminated. Then you have have a stack of ten at hand. You will not harm them if spill your coffee on them. Yet another approach is to assign each of your cheat sheets an icon, put them in a folder in your desktop where you can bring them up with a couple of clicks.

The cost depends on how many square feet you cover and how thick a film you use. For example, at Staples Canada to laminate both sides of an 8.5 × 11 letter-size piece of paper with 5 mil plastic costs .

Future Cheat Sheets

The problems with cheat sheets:

• The print is too small
• They contain material you already know very well. That just wastes real-estate.
• You can’t understand the shorthand. You need some examples.
• Over time, you no longer need basic material and need terser explanations of more advanced material.

So what we need are intelligent cheat-sheet generators. The generator shows you a giant cheat sheet. You mark off what you already know, or what is so advanced you are not ready for it yet. The document might start pale yellow for maybe-include. You swipe with the left mouse to mark pale green what you already know or what you find too advanced. You swipe with the right mouse to mark pink what you definitely want to include. The app includes from the yellow area, the most basic info to pad the poster up to standard size. The app tells you with that degree of pruning what formats the remaining material could fit on. Then it srunches it down and makes it look pretty giving you a pdf document you coud get make into a poster, on than you could print on one or more pages on your inkjet printer. You might use half a dozen versions of a cheat sheet over your career.

Art Posters

If you are just looking for some pretty posters with pictures of dolphins, whales, horses etc, try art.com or AllPosters.com.

Fish School art print Fish School

Leap of Freedom art print Leap of Freedom

Offensive Line art print Offensive Line

Dolphins art print Dolphins

Whale art print Whale

Horse In The Snow art print Horse In The Snow