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#3

An Introduction to Images

There is a lot of jargon when talking about decks. You can find definitions of most of the terms used on the Star Wars Epic Duels wiki.
Other terms, which might not be ED universal (but probably should be), will themselves be links to the definition.
Throughout this series, I refer to both Special and Power Combat cards as Talent cards.

So now you’ve got your deck ready to go; you’ve chosen your basic cards and written up your talent cards. Now you need to make your cards. You’re going to need image making software. Get your hands on a version of Photoshop (PS) by Adobe. If you can’t, there is an open source alternative called GIMP. The processes of making images for print and making images for use online are slightly different. I’ll talkabout how to make your images ready for the screen in a later article about building extensions for VASSAL. Right now, you’re getting ready to make your first PDF. Soon you'll be designing top-notch ED cards that blend almost perfectly with the Hasbro decks.

The first thing you need are image templates. There are two package for you to get good templates: Rich Pizor’s Deck Design Kit, and Dorkistan's own Epic Duels Templates. Both Rich’s kit and my templates are pre-sized, just waiting for you to add your ideas. The standard pixels per inch for printed work is 300ppi. These files are set at 150ppi. Rich assures us, that is good enough; stuff you print on your home printer most likely won’t show a difference. The standard measurement for ED cards is 2 1/16 in. X 2 7/8 in. (5.25 cm X 7.3cm), and the standard measurement for Health Charts is 4.625in. X 4.75in. (11.75cm X 12.07cm). At 150ppi, these templates are as close to those measurements as PS will let you go. The best font match I've found is Eurostyle. It's not a perfect match, but like Rich says, it's good enough.

This diagram names the components of an Epic Duels card with the approximately the correct sizes of Eurostyle. The process for placing the text on your cards will depend on which programs you use for card design, but no matter the method, you want to start with the image content of your card.While editing in GIMP or PS, each new element you add will comprise a new layer. The templates you downloaded already have several layers. The order of layers is important; layers at that top of the list will overlap or cover the lower layers, so in the end your text layers will be the topmost.Google yourself a good image for your character portrait. You need two sets of: head shots for talent cards and full-body-combat-pose shots for your basic cards, one set for the major and one set for the minor(s). Place your character portraits on the bottom most layer, so all the swaths and borders and such will overlap it. Using the text tool, place your character's name (the only text to do right now - it saves you repeating this step) and then save the file one time for each different type of card you will need for that deck: basic combats, specials, power attacks, power defends, power attack/defends. None of these templates are going to have any text on them besides the characters name, for now.
For example, if you were replicating Boba Fett's deck, you would need 6 templates: Boba power attack (for Rocket Retreat, Kyber Dart, and Deadly Aim), Boba special (for Wrist Cable and Thermal Detonator), Boba basic (for all Boba's basic cards), Greedo basic (for all Greedo's basic cards), Greedo power attack (for Desperate Shot), and Greedo special (for Sudden Arrival).How you save your templates, and how you place text on them, will differ depending on which programs you have available.

Adobe InDesign (or PageMaker)

MS Word with PDF printer diver

Microsoft Word

Well if you're reading this section, don't cry. There are worse things than being forced to use MS Word. Like listening to fingernails scrape down a chalkboard, that's worse. Or being forced to use MS Publisher. To use Word to make a PDF, you need to save your templates as jpegs. To start building the document, you need to set up your page. In the File menu, go to Page Setup. Set all your margins to 1''. Change the paper orientation to Landscape. Click OK to close the window. Change the justification to Center.

Sultan's Design Notes
Placing the card text in Word is a tedious process. It is far faster to enter your text in PS or GIMP, save the whole card, text and all as a jpeg, then import it to Word. But the card text quality will suffer. Word wasn't intended to handle images as precisely as is needed for projects like ours. If you're willing to accept the loss in quality to save time, be sure to make use of the anti-aliasing and rasterizing tools of your image editor; it will help preserve your text when Word mangles it.

You can also avoid having to resize your images in Word by starting off with an image in PS or GIMP that is 72ppi instead of 150ppi. The reason you have to resize a 150ppi image in Word, is the program interprets the file literally - what you see is what you get. Essentially, the empty page of Word is a 72ppi surface, and it converts your 150ppi image to 72ppi by increasing the overall image size. I still don't know if importing a 150ppi image then sizing it down preserves those extra pixels, or removes them.

Regardless, you definately do not want to perform both of these shortcuts in the same document; your cards will look horrible.
Now place the appropriate template for each card you will make. Place the first template type by going to the Insert menu, then the Picture sub-menu, and clicking on "From File." After placing the first template type, right-click the image. Choose "Format Picture." In the Layout tab of the menu that appears, hightlight "Behind text.' In the Size tab, make sure the Lock Aspect Ratio box is checked. Then resize your image to as close as possible to those measurments provided above. Click OK to close the menu. Then repeat those steps until you have all your template images placed. Click here for a PDF example (1st page intentionally blank) of what your document should look like when you're done placing templates. You will have to page return (Control + Enter) every other line to seperate the images into blocks of 8.Now enter the text. To save time, do the card names for all the cards first, then the "play when" field for all the cards, then the secondary effect(s) for all the cards, and attack/defend values last.

You may find the font sizes above are 1 or 2 points larger than they should be. Just reduce all the values by 2, and you'll be back on track. To enter text, go to the Insert menu and choose "Text Box." A big rectangle will appear on your page. In that rectangle, click-and-drag your cursor to draw a rectangle about the size of the text you need to place. Type the text in the box, then right-click the border, and choose "Format Text Box." In the menu that pops up, in the Colors and Lines tab, set both the line color and background color to none. You should now have the card's name in a text frame, and you should be able to drag that frame on top of the template image; place the text box on the black bar of the template. When you have multiple cards of the same name, you can copy/paste the text box for the next template, so you don't have to repeatedly type the same thing. Repeat all those steps for each section of text for each card.

Future Forseen
At this stage of the game what you name your files isn't that important, but if and when you want to make VASSAL extensions, it will be. Use a consistent naming convetion for your cards not only so they organize themselves on your computer, but because it will make editing your extensions easier.

In the example, your first card would be Rocket Retreat. After you place the text on your first RR, skip two cards (because there are three RR total) and do the card name for Kyber Dart, then Deadly Aim, then Wrist Cable, skip a card, Thermal Detonator, skip a card, and so on. After you have one kind of each card you need, make use of the Group tool (highlight and right-click all the layers of a card), and the copy/paste tool, so one assembled RR becomes three and you don't have to type the same text three times.Afer you've assembled all 31 cards, add a page for your Health Chart (be sure to resize it!), and a page for your card backs. You only need one page of card backs. Go to the section on card backs. Lastly, in order to use Word to make a PDF, you'll need a PDF printer driver. Primo PDF is the best one I've seen, but pdf 995 is a good one too. Once you get one installed, you will eventually use it by choosing Print from the File menu, and choosing your PDF driver as the printer; you'll then get a flash screen prompting you to enter some settings and the driver will take care of the rest. If the resulting PDF is too large or missing fonts, find the Print Properties menu from the Print Setup menu and toy around with the output settings of your PDF driver. Congratulations, you've made your first PDF.

sultan_of_dorkistan: do you use GIMP?
richpizor: photoshop
sultan_of_dorkistan: oh yeah forgot
richpizor:...dafouk? the 3/3 card isn't saved where it was supposed to be
sultan_of_dorkistan: can't help you there
Adobe InDesign
If you're reading this section, congratulations. You have the best publishing tool available, and you'll be glad of it. Adobe makes Microsoft look like an abacus with lights. And chances are, if you have ID, you have PS, so your job is that much easier. Soon, you'll be playing with your new decks while the Word saps are still crying about text boxes not lining up.Having the proto-templates (special, power attack, etc.) isn't necessary for the PS/ID process, but it doesn't hurt. Start with the most numerous talent card you have (probably a x3). Using the font size and styles mentioned above, create a new text layer on the appropriate template until that card is finished.

For example, Using the text tool set to 14pt all caps type ROCKET RETREAT, then proceed to the "play when" field, the secondary effect, and the attack value. When you have all the necessary text layers, go to File>Save As, and save the file as BobaRocketRetreat (or BF-Rocket, or BobaRR). Now RR is done, you can double-click on the text layer "Rocket Retreat" and change it to say "DEADLY AIM", and so on with all the layers you need to change to make that card into DA. When finsihed, File>Save As: BobaDeadlyAim (or etc.).

When finished, you will have about 20 file types - maybe even more. Here is a screen shot of all the .psd files for my Nom Anor deck. This method does create more files than the method described above, but editing your files later becomes an instantaneous effect, rather than trekking through Word to edit several cards (and then having to do it again if you have a VASSAL extension). Now you need to contstruct your document in InDesign.Lucky for you, InDesign is awesome. Here is my PDF template for ID. It's a .indd file, so I don't think it will work in PageMaker. If you can't use that template, go to Document Setup in the File window. You want 5 pages, landscape, at 10.5 x 7.5 inches. Don't worry about margins, you're going to use Guides instead. From the left ruler (x-axis) click & drag a guide 1.1125 inches away from the left edge of the page. Again from the left ruler, click & drag a guide 9.3875 inches a wa from the left edge of the paper. Between these two guides you have room to place four card images in a row. From the top ruler (y-axis) click & drag a guide .0875 inches from the top edge of the paper, and again drag a guide 6.625 inches from the top edge of the paper.

Between these two guides you have room to place two card images in a column; eight card images on a page.To place card images, go to File>Place (or Cntrl+D), find the card you want to place, then with the selection tool, right-click the newly made image and in the Fitting sub-menu choose Fit frame to content. Nestle that image in the corner made by the left guide and the top guide. Draw a guide from the left ruler to the right edge of the image you just placed. That's image 1. You now have guides to place images 2-4. Then nestle image 5, and reverse the process for 6-8. You'll notice there is a small gap running down the middle of the block, that's intentional; you can use it to offset the page with your card backs on it so they line up more accurately. InDesign makes this process so easy because it will treat the text layers of your .psd file as text when it renders them into PDF; no need to convert, rasterize, resize, or cry.Make a page for your Health Chart (which you can also import as a .psd), and a page for your card backs. Go to the section on card backs.

When you're ready to create the PDF, choose Export from the File menu. After you choose a filename, the export settings window will open up. All the check boxes in General settings should be unchecked, except for Optimize for Fast Web View. (You can check View PDF after export, if you want.) Under the Compression settings change the compatibility field to Acrobat 5. Under Color Images change Bicubic Downsampling to 150ppi for images above 150ppi, Compression should be Automatic, and Image Quality should be medium. Under Grayscale Images change Bicubic Downsampling to 150ppi for images above 225ppi. Compression should be Automatic, and Image Quality should be medium. Under Monochrome Images change Bicubic Downsampling 300ppi for images above 450ppi with compression CCIT Group 4. Both the check boxes at the bottom should be checked. Click Export to recieve accolades for making your first PDF.

If you have a full-bleed card back like the one to the left, print the front side of each page once, then print the card backs on the opposite side of each page; after you cut them out you won't be able to tell the printer didn't exactly line them up. If on the other hand you're like me, and like the fancy card backs like the one to the right, you going to have to tweak the margins of the card back page so they're slightly off those of the other card pages, and even then they will almost never perfectly line up. You have to alter the margins/guides for the card back page depending on how the printer rotates the paper for printing on the back side (horizontally or vertically). After much trial and much error, my double sided print jobs still never line up perfectly - commercial printers just aren't precise enough - but I've narrowed it down to 1/32 of an inch. A good alternative is to print one page of card backs per page of cards and after cutting them all out, paste the two halves together. This can be a nice end result, especially if you laminate the completed card, but that can lead to some expensive decks.
Now you have a working knowledge of how to assemble your deck into a distributable format. You know your way around your publishing programs, you know how to organize your methods to help you spend less time building and more time playing, and you know how - in the right hands - hairdryers are dangerous. If you've any questions, feel free to drop me a line. In the next Design This! we'll talk about getting images ready for VASSAL, and more advanced aspects of handling text for print & screen.