Quick Clicks

The Basics

Creating Card Layouts

Specifying Content

Content in CSV Files

Effects

Previewing and Finding Errors

Printing

Exporting for Documentation, Print-on-Demand, and Online Gaming

Text Layout

Item Tags and Hiding Card Items

Styles, Series, and Rotors

Appendices

NO TITLE

Most card decks contain useful information only on their faces. Their backs, at most, mark the cards as being from a particular deck in a game that has more than one kind of card.

But some cards need useful information on both sides. This section discusses how to accomplish that.

Multideck Can't Help

Multideck does not contain any features that will directly help you with double-sided printing. You can still do it, but it takes a bit of work and care; and there will be some problems to overcome.

Avoiding Double-Sided Printing

You can have double-sided cards without printing on two sides of your sheets. Instead, print card fronts and card backs on separate sheets. Then after cutting them out, carefully pair each back with its front, and sleeve them together in clear card sleeves.

See After You Print for more advice on using card sleeves for your prototype cards.

If you still want to print on both sides of the sheet, keep reading.

Use Separate Templates, or Separate Documents

Your card fronts will probably have different layouts than your card backs. But even if they don't, we recommend using different documents for the fronts and backs. This will allow you to specify different cutting guide options (see below) for the fronts and backs.

Registration Issues

Registration is how precisely a printer can place the artwork on a printed page. Home printers are bad at this, and even some semi-professional printers can be equally bad. You are likely to find that your printer prints your artwork on the page with as much as 1/8" difference from one sheet to the next. You may even notice that your artwork is sometimes tilted a little, and not perfectly parallel with the edges of the paper.

This makes trouble when you try to print on both sides of the paper, because the artwork on the front may not be aligned with the artwork on the back.

Plan for Sloppy Printing

Your best option for dealing with poor registration is to avoid placing any artwork closer than 1/8" from the cut edges of your cards. Colored borders and full-bleed artwork are very pretty, but they will probably not come out right on double-sided cards. (And remember, please, that you're making prototype decks, not final publishable art! You want your cards to be easy to read and use, but they don't have to be gorgeous.)

You can use the Card Spacing feature to separate cards on the printed page. This allows room for bleed, which is printing outside the cut boundaries of a card. Using a bleed allows you to print color or artwork to the edge of a card, even if the registration isn't perfect and the cuts aren't exactly where you expect.

Tell me more about Card Spacing.

Cutting Guides

By default, Multideck will outline every card in black when you print. If you do that on both sides of your sheets, and the alignment is off, it will be very obvious.

To avoid that issue, avoid the use of cutting guides on the front sides of your cards.

Open the Print Options dialog in the document for your card fronts. Select the option No cutting guides for that document.

Then when you cut out your cards, do it with the backs of the cards face-up. It's important that all your cards look alike from the back! It's less important for the fronts to be perfectly aligned.


Copyright © 2023 by Semicolon LLC. All international rights reserved.