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Printing game cards at home

A home printer will produce a card that measures what the page says it measures, as long as nothing in between decides to be helpful. This guide is about the settings that get in the way, in the order we hit them.

Print at 100%

Every print dialog has a scale setting, and most default to "Fit to page" or "Fit to printable area". That setting shrinks the whole sheet so that the printer's unprintable margin is respected, and a 75 mm card comes out at 72 or 73 mm with nothing on the page to tell you. Set scale to 100% or "Actual size" every time. If the dialog remembers your last choice, check it anyway; a system update can reset it.

Margins to none, background graphics on

Our sheets carry their own margins, so the dialog's margins should be set to "None" or the minimum the printer allows. Leaving the default margins on pushes the layout down and right and can bump the bottom row onto a second page.

Browsers skip background colours and images when printing unless you tell them otherwise, which is sensible for a web article and ruinous for a card. The option is called "Background graphics" in Chrome and Edge, "Print backgrounds" in Firefox, and in Safari it is a checkbox at the bottom of the dialog. Turn it on or the cards come out as outlines with text.

Let the dialog's paper decide the page

This one cost us a week. If a web page fixes its own paper size in the print stylesheet, say A4, and you print it on Letter, Chrome silently scales the entire page to fit and Safari pages the overflow onto a second sheet. We measured 76 mm cards coming out at 71 and 74 mm depending on the combination. The fix on our side was to stop fixing the paper and let the dialog's selection drive the layout: the sheet is fluid, the rows per page follow the paper, and cards print at size on both A4 and Letter. The fix on your side is simpler: pick the same paper in the print dialog that you picked in the tool, and if the preview shows more pages than you expected, that mismatch is why.

Paper

Plain 80 gsm copier paper prints fine and feels like paper. For something that handles like a card you have two routes. Heavier stock, 200 to 300 gsm, goes through most inkjets and many laser printers (check the printer's maximum; feeding card through a printer that is not rated for it is how rollers get damaged). Or you print on ordinary paper and sleeve it in front of an old card or a piece of card stock, which gives you the stiffness without the printer risk and lets you swap the print when it changes. Leagues tend to end up on the second route because the cards change so often.

Matte photo paper gives the deepest colour from an inkjet but is slippery in sleeves. Glossy paper shows fingerprints and curls. For a laser printer, a smooth 160 to 200 gsm card is the sweet spot.

Double-sided

Our back pages are mirrored so that each back lands behind its own front when the sheet is flipped. For a portrait sheet, choose "Flip on long edge" in the duplex setting. If your printer has no duplex, print the fronts, put the stack back in the tray the way the printer's manual shows, and print the backs; test with one sheet first, because every tray has its own opinion about which way is up. A small misalignment is normal. That is what the gap between cards and the bleed option are for.

Check the first print with a ruler

Measure one card on the first sheet before you print twenty. The published size is on each tool's print guide and on our card sizes page. If the card measures short by a millimetre or two on both axes, something is scaling: the dialog, the printer driver's own "fit" option, or a mismatched paper size. If one axis is right and the other is short, you have the wrong paper selected somewhere. Our own test prints, measured from the printed PDF at 254 dots per inch, came out within 0.2 mm of the target once the three settings above were right.

Printing to PDF first

Printing to a PDF and then printing the PDF from a viewer gives you a file you can reprint later without reopening the tool, and it removes the browser from the second step. Print the PDF at 100% as well; PDF viewers have their own "fit" default. The PDFs our tools produce are vector, with fonts embedded, so they stay sharp at any size.

A short checklist