Drop your business card PDF here
or click to choose it — several files at once if you like
Settings
The size your cards will come out at, on a ruler. Sizes differ by country and this list holds the ones in common use; any other size goes under “Custom”.
Lay a card out on a whole A4 or Legal page in a word processor, front on page 1 and back on page 2, and “shrink it” is what you want: the page comes down to card size, nothing is lost. “Cut it out” is for a card drawn small on an otherwise empty page, and for sheets someone already imposed. Left on “decide for me”, a page the size of a card is used as it is and anything bigger is shrunk — if that is wrong you see your whole design, small, which is easy to spot and easy to change.
Nothing here can see inside your PDF, so it cannot find the card for you. Make one sheet and look at it: if the crop missed, adjust and make another. Paper is only spent when you print.
The sheet you will actually feed the printer. It is always used portrait.
This is the one thing no PDF can detect. Get it wrong and every back lands on the wrong card. Print the test sheet on plain paper before you touch the cardstock.
Touching cards give the highest yield and a single cut per line, but bleed is clipped off. Keeping bleed opens a gutter of twice the bleed, with the cut down its middle.
Bleed is artwork that runs past the trim so a slightly off cut leaves no white edge. It has to already be in your PDF — this tool cannot invent it.
Advanced
Most desktop printers cannot put ink closer than about 4 mm to the paper edge.
These settings are kept in this browser between visits, on your machine — never sent anywhere.
Sheet preview
Drawn from the same layout code that makes the PDF. What you see here is what comes out.
Change any setting and the sheets are rebuilt straight away — no need to drop the file again.
Before you print
- Print at 100 %. Turn off “fit to page”, “shrink oversized pages” and “scale to fit” — every one of them silently makes the cards the wrong size.
- Measure the printed ruler. If the 100 mm line is not 100 mm, your printer scaled the page and the cards will not match the marks.
- For double-sided, print the test sheet on plain paper first and check the numbers pair up.
- Cut on the marks. A guillotine or a rotary trimmer holds a line far better than scissors.
For a copy shop or a print room
In trade terms: step-and-repeat imposition of one design, N-up from A4 to SRA3, with shared-cut bleed gutters or butted trims, and 0.25 pt edge ticks or per-card corner marks. It reads the TrimBox when the file declares one, and measures the card from it. Your page is embedded, not re-rendered — CMYK, spot colours and fonts are carried through as they are.
What it does not do
- Gang different designs onto one sheet. Ten designs make ten sheets, not one mixed 10-up.
- Registration marks, colour bars or slug areas.
- Booklet or signature imposition — folding needs the pages reordered, which is a different job.
- Colour management, trapping or overprint changes. Nothing about the page is interpreted.
If you need any of those, you need imposition software, not a web page. This is for the run you would otherwise lay out by hand.
Nothing leaves your computer
Your PDF is never uploaded. All the arithmetic runs in this page. You can check it: process one file, disconnect from the network, and do another — it keeps working.
Your settings are kept in this browser so you do not have to set them again. They stay on your machine and are never sent anywhere. “Forget my settings” under Advanced clears them.
The contact form below is the one exception, and only because you fill it in on purpose: what you type there is emailed to the address in the legal notice. Your PDF is not attached to it and never could be — the page has no way to send it.
PDF reading and writing by pdf-lib, MIT licensed, used unmodified.