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The airline forced me to check my poster and now it's gone lost. The session I was supposed to participate in is today, so there's little chance of finding a printer in town in a few hours†; What do I do?

† In Germany, no businesses may operate on Sunday except with explicit exemptions, and a German printer would rather go out of business than work on a Sunday anyway. Also, this is a small town in the middle of nowhere; when I write "little chance" I really mean "no chance".
errantlinguist
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    I wish you had read the question Flying with a poster tube as a hand luggage before your flight. – Nobody Aug 13 '17 at 09:39
  • Cuz, you know, you can totally tell what some airline attendant with decide at the gate a week before flying. – errantlinguist Aug 13 '17 at 09:53
  • Divide your poster in 9 and print those in standard sheets? Here is a photoshop plugin – Zenon Aug 13 '17 at 10:02
  • And for completeness the gimp method – Zenon Aug 13 '17 at 10:14
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    Have you tried contacting the conference organizers and explaining your situation to them? At the very least it's probable they have access to a printer. – lukeg Aug 13 '17 at 10:28
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    The first thing to do would indeed be to contact the conference organizers. They typically have local people who will know if there is any suitable printing service around, if you are lucky they might even have planned for this kind of situation (it's not so uncommon).

    If not, assuming that the poster accompanies a paper in the proceedings a backup plan would be to just print the paper in standard A4 sheets in any standard printer you can find, and display them on the poster board. It's better than nothing.

     – Al-Khwarizmi Aug 13 '17 at 11:13
  • @Al-Khwarizmi and most others: Why do you post an answer as a comment? – Wrzlprmft Aug 13 '17 at 15:59
  • @Wrzlprmft Good catch, I've copied my comment to separate answer. – lukeg Aug 13 '17 at 16:24
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    "there's little chance of finding a printer in town in a few hours" - In a major city? I could see some difficulty at a resort town or something, but otherwise there are print shops all over, and they don't usually need much notice to print a poster. – Bryan Krause Aug 13 '17 at 23:18
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    @Bryan Krause this is not a major city and is in Germany on a Sunday, where nothing is open at all, so, yes, my statement is very true. – errantlinguist Aug 14 '17 at 05:54
  • I think that's pretty clearly a special circumstance; thanks for adding it to your question. – Bryan Krause Aug 14 '17 at 06:32
  • Unfortunately, in Europe (e.g. France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Holland ad nauseam) it's not so special... – errantlinguist Aug 14 '17 at 12:49
  • What did you end up doing? – Niko Aug 14 '17 at 14:56
  • I notified the organizers and showed the PDF on my laptop; very professional indeed... – errantlinguist Aug 14 '17 at 15:27
  • It's much more likely you can find access to an A3, or even A4, printer (perhaps through the organisers). While it isn't exactly optimal, you could print your poster tiled across sheets. – Flyto Aug 19 '17 at 06:51

2 Answers2

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Unfortunately my answer comes too late for the OP specifically.

First, you should contact the session organizers to explain your situation. This is important because you do not want to be regarded as a no-show by the organizers. Depending on the conference, it may have a negative impact being able to present at the same conference in the future.

Second, you would want to avoid wasting your opportunity to present at a poster session. As others have suggested, try to print a full size or even a partial size poster, or even just your major figures. Ultimately the point is for attendees to see your research, results, affiliation and to network, and any kind of information is better than no information. As long as its enough for someone to come up and talk to you, I'm sure you can fill out the rest of the details by your memory.

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Try to contact the conference organizers and explain your situation to them. At the very least it's probable they have access to a printer.

lukeg
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