Montreal Tech Watch

Looking to Print Customized Cards, Thanks for any feedback

By Heri Nov 6th 2008 in entrepreneurship, Events, Open Source

One of Akoha‘s inherent charm is how it manages to tie an offline game with an online component. It gives much more meaning to the service, and certainly a better experience for members of the website.

cards

One of my current ideas right now is to be able to print business cards-like from this section of TechEntreprise. So you sign up there, fill in a few information, and afterwards you could get a “member card” that can be used for local events, with details about what’s your profile (a web programmer, a designer, an investor etc.), and what you’re looking for. Other ideas:

  • show the username so people can hook up with you just after the event,
  • have color codes on the avatar depending on your profile,
  • list projects you’re working now currently etc.
  • being able to print on different kind of papers (such as a special color for a special category of the website’s members)
  • being able to completely automate it (and not spend hours printing one business card)

Now, I’m vaguely aware that one can get sheets of blank business cards-like at a store like at Staples, and then print them from your laptop with a normal printer; but from my perspective, you need special software plus they do have a fixed size for the business cards.

Does someone here have experience in these sort of thing? what kind of setup is needed (such as what kind of printer)? Is it possible to print it with the HTML or TechEntreprise will have to render it in PDF?

Thanks for any feedback :-)

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Comments

  • Aydin Mirzaee November 06, 2008

    You have to go buy the sheets from Staples or somewhere like that… Each one of these cards has an identification number. Microsoft Word has the templates associated with each identification number from all the major brands (like Avery).

    Essentially, you open up a Microsoft Word Template corresponding with the type of sheets you want to print on… you paste in your design and print from any normal printer… Once printed, the sheets are detachable (i.e. 10 business cards in a sheet)….

  • Jerome Paradis November 06, 2008

    I’ve extensively used and developed such solutions. It’s not as simple as it seems. In any case, for the most univeral results, generating PDFs would be the way to go.

    Solutions that takes HTML on the server side to generate PDFs are usually not flexible enough.

    The best bet is probably to generate the PDFs natively through PDF generation libraries, which is a bit of a pain. Manipulating existing PDF files can be trickier. Different libraries exist. Here’s one for Ruby:
    http://ruby-pdf.rubyforge.org/pdf-writer/demos/index.html
    For your need, it should do the job without too many headaches.

    One HTML to PDF solution I developed is a server-side service that uses HTML templates and the almost unknown Print Template technology of Internet Explorer. Won’t work on Linux and anyway, it was a sizable R&D project. But the end results is complete Word-like dynamic layout customization and pagination through HTML to generate PDFs. But, even if it’s automated, it was conceived to generate huge jobs in batches to automate print production.

    Leaving it to the client side with HTML is a problem because of differences in browsers, print pagination, customized headers and footers, etc. Not worth the trouble for users.

    One easy client-side solution a customized Word template (it supports all common business card formats) and an export file. However, it’s not universal and the users have to manipulate files on the client. Not worth the trouble, To be universal, do everything on the server-side.

  • Heri November 06, 2008

    Aydin, the tricky part is the “paste your design” since the input comes from a HTML page.

    Jerome Paradis, at least for the first trials, I think it won’t be on the client-side. So, we could avoid the HTML->PDF part, so generate PDF directly. I’ll explore PDF ruby libraries and get data directly from the database.

    keep tuned…

  • Montreal Tech Watch November 06, 2008

    Looking to Print Customized Cards, Thanks for any feedback http://tinyurl.com/5z4pno

  • Denis Canuel November 07, 2008

    You could look into exporting to XML files. OpenOffice and MS Office support some sort of XML files.

    From the XML file, you can easily print (using the software) or re-convert to PDF (maybe not needed at this point?).

  • Alex Williams November 10, 2008

    Hi heri,

    Have you been to http://www.moo.com ? If I understand your request correctly, they might able to do what you want.

    Alex

  • Heri November 11, 2008

    I’ve seen moo, but from what I know, it’s meant for 1 person wanting to get business cards (in series of 50). The goal here is to print one business card for each person, each time.

  • Francois November 22, 2008

    I do not personally know the best way but if someone know im pretty sure it’s Flacko, a young graphic designer. he did stuff for me at a price and a quality i never thought was possible.

    http://www.newartcrew.com or info@newartcrew.com

  • Heri November 22, 2008

    Thanks for the tip François, will contact Flacko, although it’s not about graphic design, it’s about setting up an automated system to print business cards…

  • paisible January 25, 2009

    Hey Heri,

    I did something similar before – I used a
    server-side library that generated the PDFs using XML templates – it was a bit of a hassle cause the data came from html templates and was pretty variable, but in your case I would assume you’ll be pulling most of the data from your db, so you could give your users pre-rendered PDF cards.

    Can’t remember the name of the library off the top of my head, but it was for ASP and commercial – so unfortunately can’t recommend anything OS for *nix.

    If I understand correctly, you want to let users download these cards and print them themselves – why not print them for the users as a service?

    Moo.com lets you order cards with up to 100 different designs for no extra cost – one design per card.

    I can see it now: montreal-tech community trading cards.. hahaha make it happen Heri :)

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