CardCreator

CardCreator is a simple Python script to create custom playing cards. It takes text and image data from a csv spreadsheet and combines it all into a single .png file. CardCreator is much more primitive than any image editing program BUT it makes iterating on a card game very fast. Rather than fussing around with every single image layer whenever you want to make a change, just edit the values of the csv and re-run the script. It can even output multiple copies of each card to pdf.

Instructions for non-programmers

A lot of this looks a lot scarier than it is! But trust me, it might take a little while to setup, but it's easy to run afterwards.

A lot of the notes here require you to use terminal commands. For Windows users, this means going to the start menu, clicking the search bar, typing in powershell (without quotes), and hitting return. For Mac users, this means opening terminal. For Linux, it depends on your setup.

Whenever there are commands, just type them in and press enter. If you see something like /path/to/file, I don't mean that literally. Replace everything after the first / with the location of the file (for example: /users/seth/Documents/CardCreator/)

Note that in Windows it doesn't matter whether you uPpeR CAse or not in the terminal, but it does on Mac or Linux.

Installation

1. Get Python 2.7 a. Windows and Mac: https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/ b. Debian and Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python c. Windows: Set the Python path https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3701646/how-to-add-to-the-pythonpath-in-windows-7
2. Get pygame a. Windows and Mac: https://www.pygame.org/download.shtml b. Linux: sudo easy_install pygame
3. Get fpdf: a. Windows: pip install fpdf b. Mac and Linux: sudo pip install fpdf
4. Linux and Mac: make the script executable.

cd /path/to/script
chmod +x CardCreator.py

Setup

How to use the sample files.

1. Move Sample_Input.zip into Input/
2. Extract Sample_Input.zip

How to make your own cards.

1. Set up the config file

Parameter	Description
header_font_size	Size of the header font.
header_font	File name for the header font (be sure to include the file extension). This file must be in Input/Fonts
header_y	y (vertical) position of the the header text. 0 = the absolute top of the card.
fg_y	y position of the foreground image.
body_font_size	Size of the body font
body_font	File name for the body font (be sure to include the file extension). This file must be in Input/Fonts
body_y	y position of the body text.
body_width_percent	The width of the body text as a percentage of the width of the card. (If this is less than 1, there will be some padding on the sides of the body text.)
body_line_spacing	Spacing between lines of body text, as a percentage of the font size.
output_to_pdf	1 = create a pdf file
dpi	Image resolution on the pdf

2. Add foreground images

Place them in the Images/Foregrounds folder. They must all be .png

3. Add background images.

Place them in the Images/Backgrounds folder. They must all be .png

4. Add some words to cards.csv

See the example for the correct format. Don't add file extensions (.png) to the image names

How to run the program

Run the following commands:

Windows	OS X and Linux
cd /path/to/script	cd /path/to/script
python CardCreator.py	./CardCreator.py