Seperate your white cards and black cards, and put one card on each line. White cards go on the left, black cards go on the right (duh). If the line wraps, that’s ok. Text will shrink as necessary to fit on each card. Zero-length lines won’t get turned into cards, so you can separate each card with an empty line to distinguish between wrapping lines and the next card. However, lines containing only spaces will get turned into blank cards.

The program will try to detect “Pick 2” and “Pick 3” black cards by the number of blanks in the card, but this can be specfied explicitly by adding [[2]] or [[3]] to the beginning or end of the line.

You can pick which card size you prefer, the small 2″x2″ cards, which match the official PDFs released by Cards Against Humanity, large, rectangular 2.5″x3.5″ cards which match the size of full-sized playing cards, or large 2.5″x3.5″ with rounded corners. The cards with rounded corners best match actual playing cards, but cutting the rounded corners will take much longer than cutting out perfectly rectangular cards.

You can specify as many cards as you want. White cards and black cards will be combined into a single pdf file. If you want, you can specify one card per page, with pages fitted to the size of the cards. Otherwise pdfs will be generated with cards tiled on 8.5″x11″ pages. White cards and black cards are rendered on separate pages, with the pages of white cards first then the black cards. If the number of cards specified doesn’t fit evenly on a page, the remainder of the page will be filled with blank cards.

It is also possible to specify a custom icon, for the lower left hand corner of the cards. The icon will be automatically scaled to the right size. The icon file needs to be either a .jpg or .png file and less than 1MB in size.

Line text can be formatted with html-like tags. This is handled using the “inline_format” capabilities of the Prawn Ruby library that Bigger, Blacker Cards uses to generate PDF files. The following tags work when added to cards:

• <b></b> Bold text. Note that card lettering is bold by default, so you may need to add a closing </b> tag to eliminate the bold format, followed by another <b> tag to reinstate it.
• <i></i> Italic text.
• <u></u> Underlined text.
• <strikethrough></strikethrough> Strike-through text.
•  Subscript text.
•  Superscript text.
• <br> Line break.
• <color rgb=”#ff0000″></color> Set color of text, in this example red.
• <font name=”Comic Sans MS”></font> Set font of text, in this example “Comic Sans MS”. Be sure to use a valid font name, otherwise the application will crash with an error. Valid fonts include:
  • Helvetica (the default)
  • Arial
  • Arial Black
  • Andale Mono
  • Comic Sans MS
  • Courier
  • Courier New
  • Georgia
  • Impact
  • Times-Roman
  • Times New Roman
  • Trebuchet MS
  • Verdana