I need help w/ placing TEXT on BLANK Magic cards.

[Buttons]

Christmas is coming up soon,
As well as my girlfriend's (almost wife's) birthday on January 7th.

Last year, I gave her a really amazing gift, and I wanted to top it off this year with something better.

She loves fairy tales, and stories about princesses and whatnot - she grew up on them and never grew out of the love she had for all this mythical folklore - of knights and dragons and whatnot.

So here's the thing:  I bought 250 blank cards (from the gold-bordered world champ decks) and patched together a FAIRY TALE from all the pictures I have.

It stars an evil villian (frozen shade), with me (Gerrard) and her (a NUMBER of people, but she looks almost exactly like the chick on Douglas Shuler's BENALISH HERO).

I don't want to just write on the cards in ball-point pen, so I was wondering HOW ON EARTH I can type up the story, and imprint it upon the cards, before actually pasting the picture from the real cards (which I'd cut out) onto the picture on the blank cards.

I only want text, but I don't know how to do it.  Would I need some kind of special program, or special printer?  Can anyone help me out with this?

[War]

If the cards are glossy, this might not work, but you could give it a shot:

Make a Word document or .PSD with the right size, and print it in black and white on a pice of paper.  Photoshop will automatically center your picture when it prints.

Print one copy in black and white.  Cut it out of the paper using a hobby knife.  Affix a blank card to the back of the paper so that it lines up with the way you want the text to be printed; masking tape works well for this.  Then put the paper and card back into the printer, and print the file again.  It will be printed on the card in the exact same position.

If the finish on the card screws with the ink, you may have to remove it (with nail polish remover or acetone; acetone is better and will not dampen your card the way watered-down remover will).

[jro]

I would like to vouch for the "double printing" technique above, and offer a few pointers from my experience at making proxy cards.

• The best program to use for this sort of thing would be a page layout program like FrameMaker, Quark XPress, or Microsoft Publisher.  These types of programs will offer you much more control over where the text is placed than word processing programs, and will make text editing much easier than photo editing programs.
• Your template sheets that you print out should have the text box outlined-- don't just fill the text box with junk text.  Obviously, you'll turn off the outline when printing the cards.  Come to think of it, I'd print the text boxes as filled with black, then cut out the text box of one of the blank cards.  You could then position that one card precisely over the text box and trace the outline of the card.
• Templates can be used for printing cards multiple times, so long as they aren't ripped.  Use heavier paper stock (glossy would be best) so that it's easiest to add and remove the masking tape.  I've had success with stubborn paper feed mechanisms by creating a 2-piece of paper thick "sandwich" where one piece has the outline of the card cut out.  The advantage to this is that the card doesn't bulge up from the paper any.  But don't bother with this unless your printer gives you fits.
• You'll want to use a printer that has as close to a straight paper path as possible.  Anything that turns the paper over 180 degrees is likely to get jammed when bending the magic cards.
• Don't just photocopy your template to make more of them.  The photocopier will slightly reposition the text boxes and throw off your alignment.
• Place the masking tape so that it covers the edges of the card, otherwise the cards will likely jam your printer.
• Better safe than sorry - leave yourself some margin for error in the placement of the text boxes. And use justified text if you have 3 or more text lines on the card!
• My cheap Samsung laser printer prints on cards without much hassle, printing crisp text that doesn't fade or smear, and the paper feed positions prints exactly the same each time.  Ink jets will smear like crazy unless you fix the ink, and tend to be much sloppier with their vertical alignment.
• Last, but not least, have you considered just printing the text onto stickers or labels and affixing them to the card.  You'll save yourself a lot of hassle, and I don't think it would diminish the overall quality of what you're doing.

Good luck with your project!  Maybe you could post a scan or two when you've got it done?  And what was your source for all of the blank cards?

[Buttons]

Thanks for the tips.  I don't understand hardly any of that, unfortunately.  (not a big computer guy, or anything of the like).

So, methinks I'll just have to take it to Kinko's and ask them about it.  Show them what you've wrote, and hope they understand it. 

Sure, I'll post some scans when I'm through with it. 

I could do the sticker type thing, but I don't exactly know how to do that, and I want this thing to look GORGEOUS for her.

Do you know how to bind it together?  I'm going to take it to a professional book-binder eventually and ask him what the best course of action would be.

I don't care if this thing takes me a hundred bucks to complete, it's gonna be perfect.

I got all of 'em off Ebay.  Some guy was selling 10x"proxies" at .50 a go, (or something like that,) so I just bought like 300 of them.