Ubuntu – A good card creating application

OpenOffice.org does envelopes quite excellently.

Open any text document, click on Insert → Envelope. The rest is completely self-explanatory to anybody who's ever had to use office-type software.

There are other options, I use scribus with the pdfjam utility and Latex, the master page feature of scribus lends itself well to this kind of thing.

Usually when you create business cards you want multiple cards to appear on a single sheet for printing but you want to work with just one card page when editing. here is how to accomplish this with some other tools.

SCRIBUS WITH PDFJAM

Install the pdfjam package, this requires texlive and the texlive-latex-recommended packages, Install scribus-ng.

Start scribus-ng and set Document Layout to Single Page, set Default Unit to inches, set page Width to 3.5 inches set page Height to 2.0 inches. this is for U.S. card, set Number Of Pages to 10. set all Margin Guides to 0.125 inch, click OK.

Click the edit menu, in the list click Master Pages, a box with the master pages will pop up, there will be a default master page called Normal already there and will be selected for you, start adding text and graphics to this page, you will not need to edit any other pages, everything that you placed on this page will appear on every page in the document that the master is applied to, by default this one is applied to every page.

You can import a wide variety of vector graphics including svg files created with inkscape you can also add bitmap graphics such as photos.

Save the scribus document, close the Master Pages dialog, click the save as pdf button on the scribus toolbar, a 10 page pdf of the document will be saved in the location you selected.

go to the folder where you saved the pdf document and run pdfjam on it like this:

pdfjam --nup 2x5 --papersize '{8.5in,11in}' --noautoscale true card.pdf -o 10upcard.pdf

If your pdf saved by scribus was called card.pdf a document called 10upcard.pdf will be created with all pages in card.pdf imposed on a letter sized sheet ready for printing. this can be printed on Avery 8371 or your own card stock.

If you want a border around the cards you can run the command below:

pdfjam --nup 2x5 --papersize '{8.5in,11in}' --noautoscale true --frame true card.pdf -o 10upb.pdf

This is useful when you want a cutting guide when you are not using perforated card stock from suppliers like Avery.

Output of pdfjam showing six of the imposed cards

USING LATEX

Use is made of the latex put command to enable latex with a small amount of code to make fairly good looking simple business cards, see the following link for some examples you can download http://www-ece.rice.edu/gsc/bus_cards/bus_cards.html