success! hooray for python and cairopango, I say. A fun game for us at Christmas. Nicely done (and quick, although not all that cheap) from https://www.personalisedplayingcards.com
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success! hooray for python and cairopango, I say. A fun game for us at Christmas. Nicely done (and quick, although not all that cheap) from https://www.personalisedplayingcards.com
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Pleased to report that the game with these cards was eminently successful to play during Christmas dinner cooking!
@sil I did something along these lines once with Cairo/Pango (varying the font size and the number of lines to fill the space vertically, rather than horizontally as you're doing, but still). This was so long ago that I don't think GI was a thing yet, mind.
@sil That sounds like a TeX issue. Knuth knows!
@sil When I did something like this for my blog (Codeberg preview things before Forgejo changed the OpenGraph preview image to match GitHub), I generated an SVG for each line of text, with the viewbox set to the (still estimated, though) width of the line. Then show each line-image at the same width and they scale as expected.
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@jcolag the problem is that it's not that regular, because i need the heights to all add up to the correct thing as well 😊 but what you did is the sort of idea I am imagining, indeed!
obviously step 2 is then "turn this into an actual physical deck of 100 cards each of which have different words on", which I think is best done with a custom card printing service; doing this at home would mean a right faff printing on card and cutting them out, doing it double sided, etc. https://www.printerstudio.co.uk seem the best I can find so far (can do 100 cards not 52, in the UK, less than £30, can order one single pack) but I am open to suggestions here.
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extremely annoyed that I have my deck of cards designed, and I've gone through the whole deck creation process with printerstudio, and the price is OK (a little more than I wanted to pay at £40, but what the hell) but shipping takes a month and costs £11.50! it's one deck of cards, you thieves! gonna look around for alternatives. Irritated.
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Did it with personalisedplayingcards.com instead (who appear to be Ivory under the covers, although Ivory want you to do a run of 50 packs, not a one-off). Roughly the same price (£40), I had to do the 108 cards as two separate packs, and it was annoying to set up, but they ship next week for nothing (and 24h delivery was a fiver).
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Companies: if you take money off a price so you can advertise it as being lower than the competition, but then put that same money back on shipping costs so you end up charging outrageous amounts to ship something tiny, then I will avoid using you out of sheer spite. Be told.
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@sil that'll be illegal soon in the marxist EU. (Digital Fairness Act)
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@brucelawson drop shippers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains
Not sure if they do cards or something like that but I always used to use https://www.instantprint.co.uk/ for business stationery.
Cheaper than Vistaprint and no ridiculous delivery charges.
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@adaliabooks I don't think they do anything like I want, I'm afraid.
@sil drivethru do some on demand card printing. https://www.drivethrucards.com/en/
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@realms they do but that’s oriented around “you want to sell this”, isn’t it? This is a one-off job. Maybe I’m wrong though?
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@sil it’s been a while, but I think you can do a draft and then sample run. Might need a publisher account though. https://www.thegamecrafter.com/ Might be an option too?
@sil we had some custom cards printed a while ago by https://www.makeplayingcards.com/
We were very happy with price and quality.
@sil I have a lot of opinions (and experiences) with custom card production. Happy to chat!
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@Michaelcarducci ooh, goodness yes I can imagine! I think the actual card production on this one should be pretty simple, I'm basically looking for cheapness to get a set for me and the family to play at christmas; it's generating all the card images by programmatically fiddling all the text that will be awkward. But I would love to hear any thoughts you have!
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@sil have you considered turning the text into SVG? You could break the text into chunks, position them on the canvas you can scale linearly so each chunk is the same width.
Seems way easier than manually typesetting each card.
For card production, most companies use the wrong paper stock (should be three layers) and a finish (limits friction). Makeplayingcards.com is where I go to print cards these days. I usually opt for the higher quality stock and finish.
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@Michaelcarducci I have considered that! the issue is: how do I, from a script that generates an SVG, know what font size to set? I don't know how to calculate the text metrics for an SVG without being in a browser, at which point I can have the browser scale text until it fits but then I have to manually save the calculated values out. Doable, but fiddly, especially since I need to generate 100 separate images. I can do it in browser, but I was trying to avoid it :)
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@sil doing this in a browser would either be a weird hack or a weird flex.
I did something like this an embarrassingly long time ago.
Basically I defined some layout patterns (e.g. stacked large font, smaller font, large font) and defined optimal lengths for each row.
Each of these was a class that had a common interface. It had a max character length, a TryParse(string str, out ITextShape) method as well as a factory that would return a random, valid concrete.
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@Michaelcarducci second tip for MPC, as well! This is a good sign. I've been looking at printerstudio here in the UK, who I think might be related, or possibly just design thieves ;-)
https://mastodon.social/@sil/115607133466510836
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