Printing and pre-press
Everything between a deck that looks right on screen and a file a print shop will run without emailing you back.
Print-and-play, free
The PDF lays the cards out on physical pages at true size — card pixels map to paper through the blueprint's DPI. Choose the page (A3, A4, A5, Letter, Legal, Tabloid), portrait or landscape, the page margin and the spacing between cards. Cards are centred in the grid, and a deck that does not fit continues on the next page.
That much is free, and it is a real print-and-play file: print it, cut it, sleeve it, play tonight.
The pre-press settings Pro
The rest exists to satisfy a printing press rather than a player, and it is what a Boardsmith Pro licence buys.
Bleed
Cards are drawn with their bleed, so the artwork continues past where the blade will fall. Set the amount on the blueprint — see Blueprints — and check what your shop asks for, because they do not all ask for the same thing.
Cut lines
Corner crop marks sit at the trim lines, offset past the bleed so they survive the cut and do not print inside the card.
Duplex backs
Interleaves column-mirrored back pages so that long-edge duplex printing lands each back behind its own front. Getting this wrong by hand is the single most common way a print-and-play run is wasted.
CMYK and PDF/X-1a
A press does not print in RGB. Boardsmith converts through an ICC profile — the one your print shop publishes, or the system's if you have none — keeps the crop marks on the black plate alone, and can stamp the file as PDF/X-1a with that profile embedded as its output intent, which is what a preflight checks for.
No colour profile ships with Boardsmith, deliberately: every good one is encumbered, and the right profile is the one your shop publishes anyway. Point the app at theirs.
Print-shop presets
The Game Crafter, MakePlayingCards and Longpack ship as presets carrying their own published bleed, DPI and file-naming rules. Choosing one fills the settings in and then checks your blueprint against them — if your bleed is short of what the shop requires, it says so before you export rather than after they reject the upload.
Before you spend money
- Read the export warnings. All of them.
- Print one page at home first and cut it. Paper finds problems screens hide.
- Order a proof — a handful of cards — before a full run. Converted colours are an approximation of what a press will lay down, and no preview on a backlit screen is a promise about ink.
- Check what your shop wants: bleed, DPI, colour space, one file per card or a PDF. The preset knows, but shops change their specs.