: Creating bulk PDFs from Spreadsheet? I have designed a TCG game with roughly 500 card created. I have a card frame made, and would like to use these to create a PDF of each card. Is there

@Pierce403

It sounds like what you are looking for is a data merge solution. Data merge is simply where you have a shell document with variables in it and a data file (usually a spreadsheet saved as a CSV file) that is used to replace the variables.

There are a lot of solutions for this. Here are a few (some of these will require that you re-create or import your design into a different program. This may be trivial or very hard, depending on your design. There are probably other ways that would allow you to re-use your existing PSD.)

Use Photoshop

If you're already doing your design work in Photoshop and that's your preferred application, doing it in Photoshop is probably the most natural solution. I am not a Photoshop user, but Adobe has some instructions for doing this.

Use InDesign

InDesign has a very robust data merge feature. I have used data merge with InDesign for complex, several hundred page reports without any issues. Instructions here.

Use Scribus

Scribus is an open source program that attempts to fill the void of a free InDesign replacement. It does not have a built in data merge feature, but the Scribus Generator script. I have done this with smaller documents (about 20 records), so I can't vouch for how well it will work with your 500.

Inkscape and scripting

Inkscape works with SVG files, which are just XML files. If you created your design as an SVG file and put some text variables in place (e.g. %CARDNAME%), you could script this. (For 500 cards, this is probably the method I would use because it would be very extensible and I'm comfortable with the command line).

The script would need to:


For each record, copy the template SVG file.
Replace each variable in the SVG file appropriately
Convert the SVG file to whatever output you want (such as PDF)
Do any additional processing (such as combining into a single PDF, special handling for specific files, etc)


There's more

There are a lot more ways to do this. If you have a preferred application, there's probably a way to make it do a data merge. Good searches will for "Program_Name data merge" will find many other ways to do this.

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@Phylliss782

It depends on what programming environment you're comfortable in and the format you're able to supply your primitives.

As I mentioned here, I've had pretty good luck with Flat and Even from xxyxyz.org/. The project hasn't been updated in some time, though, so your milage may vary.

Processing is also a nice choice and has a very active community behind it to help answer any questions. I've used it to generate very complex PDF's VERY quickly.

Inkscape has extensive scripting capabilities, and there's a few data-merge solutions that people have created already.

And of course, you can always use Imagemagick to composite text onto a background from the command line.

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