Scanning printed cards
Cards you have already printed become a project: scan the sheets, and every card is found on the paper, straightened and cut out — and whatever the machine got wrong, you fix before anything is written.
Starting
New project ▸ Scans ▸ Choose scans… takes a folder of scans, or picked images or a PDF. Nothing is read until you say so. A folder is looked through first, and what does not look like a sheet of cards — the rulebook that lives beside them, most likely — is left unticked. So are two folders under one folder, which are usually the same deck at two paper sizes and would give every card twice. Tick back whatever you do want.
Two choices come before the reading, because they change what it does:
- Find the cards on the sheets — every card is looked for, straightened and framed, for you to check. Untick it and the sheets open empty, for you to put the cards down yourself.
- Read the words on the cards — each card gets its title and text, and the layout a tracing of where they sat. Slower, and it needs a text recogniser on this computer.
Not sure? Help me decide asks five questions — how the pictures were made, what is behind the cards, how far apart they are, whether the background shows all the way round, whether they lie square — and says whether the search suits your pictures. On some it will not, and putting the cards down by hand is then quicker than deleting what the search got wrong.
Scanning so the cards are found
- A dark background. Scan with the lid open, or lay a dark sheet over the cards. Pale cards on a pale lid leave nothing to tell paper from background.
- About 5 mm between cards. Cards that touch leave no gap to cut along, and a whole block comes back as one rectangle.
- Background all the way round. The background's tone is read off the border of the picture, so a photograph whose cards run off the edge comes back empty.
- Square to the glass. The search looks about twenty degrees either way; a card thrown down further than that comes back framed wrong.
- A phone held flat over the middle of the cards. A photograph taken at a slant makes every card a slight trapezoid; a lean that is left can be straightened by hand.
- No patterned table. Wood grain and tablecloths are edges everywhere, and the search finds them as readily as the cards.
Checking what was found
The import opens on two tabs. Blueprints lists the card shapes found — one per size of card — and Sheets shows every scan with a rectangle on each card. Open a sheet to put the rectangles where the cards really are. It works like any canvas: drag, snap, group, copy and paste, undo.
- Put a card down where the search missed one.
- Draw a new card size round a card the list has no shape for — or round a whole block, saying how many cards across and down. Either way, that gives the card its size.
- Paste on every sheet — for print-and-play sheets that all share one layout, one sheet put right is every sheet put right.
- Find again reads a sheet again at a card's known size, once one rectangle sits on a real card.
- Cut a region out as a sheet of its own, to read part of a busy scan on its own; this sheet is one card, for a scan of a single card.
- Leave this sheet out of the import altogether.
The card's size
A card's size is measured off the scan's resolution. A file that does not say what resolution it was made at — or says a screen's, which no scanner measured — gets its size typed instead, and the import asks you to check it before cutting: a deck cut at the wrong size is a deck to print again.
Open a card to see it as it will be printed and sit the picture in its frame: scale it, turn it, straighten a lean either way, or lay another card under it as a mark to line it up to. A shape that came out on its side is stood the other way round in one step, and every card of that shape turns with it.
What you get
Import the cards writes every card out as its own file and makes a project of them: a blueprint per shape, a deck of the cards. The picture is the card. With the words read, the layers panel has a folder called Read from the cards whose eye is shut — the scan already shows those words, and the folder keeps them and their places for the day you redraw the art rather than reprint it. Open the eye to see them.
Help ▸ Tutorials ▸ After Scanning walks round a freshly scanned project. Scanning is free, with or without a Pro licence.