Cardwright Open the studio

The Cardwright guide

Everything from first paste to cards on your table. Ten minutes, start to finish.

1 · Your first deck in five minutes 2 · Data: importing and editing 3 · Design: templates, bindings, fonts 4 · Card backs (including per-card backs) 5 · Printing that lines up: gutter-fold vs duplex 6 · Calibrating your printer 7 · PNG and Tabletop Simulator exports 8 · Saving, backups, and moving machines 9 · Free vs Pro, license keys, refunds

1 · Your first deck in five minutes

  1. Open the studio. It loads with the Emberfall sample — a 9-card fantasy deck you can mangle freely.
  2. Click any cell in the left Data panel and type. The card preview updates as you type.
  3. Click Export → keep Print PDF — duplex selected → Export. You now have a print-ready PDF with cut guides.
  4. Replace the sample with your own game: Import data, paste from your spreadsheet, restyle. That’s the whole loop.

2 · Data: importing and editing

Cardwright treats your deck as a table: one row = one card, one column = one field.

Paste from Excel / Google Sheets

  1. In your spreadsheet, select your cards including the header row and copy.
  2. In Cardwright: Import data → paste into the big box → Import.

Both apps put tab-separated text on the clipboard, which Cardwright reads natively. Quoted CSV files (with commas inside fields) also work via Open file….

Importing replaces your card data but keeps your design. The columns you bind in the template just need to keep the same names.

Editing in place

3 · Design: templates, bindings, fonts

A card design is a stack of elements — text, images, and boxes — positioned in millimeters on the card. You edit them in the right-hand panel or directly on the big preview (drag to move, corner handle to resize, arrow keys to nudge half a millimeter, Shift+arrows for 2 mm).

Bindings

Type {Name} in a text element and each card shows its own name. Bindings work in text, image sources, and colors — a column of hex colors like #ef476f can drive a header stripe per card type (the Moonshot sample does exactly this).

Text that never overflows

Leave shrink to fit on and long rules text steps down (to a floor) until it fits its box — your wordiest card and your shortest card both look deliberate.

Images

Fonts

Six bundled open-license faces: Inter, PT Serif, MedievalSharp, Metamorphous, Special Elite, Bangers. They’re embedded (subset) into your PDFs, so the printout matches the preview on any machine.

4 · Card backs

Toggle Back above the preview. Backs have their own background and element stack, shared by every card.

Per-card backs: bindings work on the back too. Put {Type} in a back text element — or {BackArt} in a back image element — and each card gets its own back. (Great for player aids and reference cards.)

5 · Printing that lines up

Gutter-fold (recommended when alignment matters most)

  1. Export → Print PDF — gutter fold.
  2. Print single-sided, actual size (turn off “fit to page”).
  3. Fold along the dashed line so the backs land behind the fronts. Crease hard.
  4. Glue the halves (a glue stick over the whole area beats dots), then cut on the guides.

Backs are mirrored across the fold by geometry, so they cannot misalign left-to-right. The trade: fewer cards per sheet than duplex.

Duplex (more cards per page, needs one calibration)

  1. Calibrate once (next section).
  2. Export → Print PDF — duplex. Pages come out interleaved: fronts, backs, fronts, backs…
  3. Print double-sided, long-edge flip, actual size.
Whichever route: 3 mm bleed (Design panel) makes any residual hair of drift invisible — the artwork extends past the cut line, so there’s no white sliver to see.

6 · Calibrating your printer

  1. Export → duplex mode → Calibrate printer… → Download test sheet.
  2. Print it double-sided, long-edge flip, actual size.
  3. Hold the printed sheet up to a bright light. You’ll see 25 cross pairs; exactly one pair (or one clear best) will coincide.
  4. Click that cross’s code (like B4) in Cardwright. Done — every duplex export from now on compensates automatically.

The test sheet’s back crosses are drawn by the same placement code that draws your card backs, so the correction you pick is exact — not an approximation.

Recalibrate if you change printer, driver, or paper weight. The offsets live on the Calibrate screen if you ever want to tweak by hand (dx moves backs toward the sheet’s right edge as viewed from the back).

7 · PNG and Tabletop Simulator

PNG (ZIP)

Every card, front and back, at exactly 300 DPI (a poker card is 750 × 1050 px; with 3 mm bleed, 822 × 1122 px — the numbers MakePlayingCards and friends ask for). Files are named 001_Card_Name.png in fronts/ and backs/ folders.

Tabletop Simulator (Pro)

  1. Export → Tabletop Simulator. You get faces_sheetN_10xM.jpg images (≤ 4096 px, RGB — TTS’s requirements), a back.png, and a README with the numbers.
  2. Upload the images anywhere TTS can reach (Steam Cloud upload inside TTS is easiest).
  3. In TTS: Objects → Components → Cards → Custom Deck. Face = sheet image, Back = back.png, Width/Height = the numbers in the README (usually 10 × something).
  4. Decks over 69 cards arrive as multiple sheets — import each, then combine the stacks.

8 · Saving, backups, and moving machines

9 · Free vs Pro

Free: the whole designer, calibration, and every print export, up to 18 cards per export (two full poker sheets). Pro ($24, one-time): unlimited cards, Tabletop Simulator export, custom card sizes — forever.

Open the studio →