Export images and print-ready PDFs

Use Export for generated card and component artwork. This is different from a dataset export, a game archive, an account export, or the Manifest button.

Use a manufacturer preset

Choose an Output preset when a print provider has fixed artwork requirements:

• Generic keeps the normal ZIP and PDF controls available for home printing, proofs, or another printer.
• The Game Crafter prepares the selected product's required surfaces as full-canvas, 300 DPI RGB PNG files in a ZIP. You can also enable a normal sheet PDF for proofing, but that PDF is not a replacement for the provider PNG files. The Document product uses its dedicated ordered PDF instead.
• Azao Games supports the listed 87 × 56 mm and 88 × 63 mm card profiles. It prepares separate front and back FOGRA39 CMYK PDF files in one ZIP.

Select the product format in Designs before choosing a manufacturer preset. Studio matches a saved product and catalog revision; it does not guess a product from similar dimensions. If Export asks you to choose or update a product profile, return to Designs, select the current format, review the resize preview, and save it.

Provider settings that affect file validity are locked by the preset. The Export plan shows the preset, render size, colour/output format, required surfaces, and enabled files before you export. Switch Output preset back to Generic whenever you need fully editable output settings.

Product surfaces and print guides

The current catalog lists 201 customizable The Game Crafter product profiles covering 368 artwork surfaces. Search by product name, category, material, colour, surface, or provider; shortcuts such as tgc, gamecrafter, azao, azou, and aouzu also work.

When a product has several artwork areas, such as face and back, inside and outside, box top and bottom, die faces, or ordered book pages, the Designer shows a surface switcher. Complete every required surface before export. Page-based products keep their page order and front/back assignment in the exported file.

For supported provider formats, the Designer displays the official surface overlay at its original proportions. This includes irregular warning fills, folds, holes, and separate printable islands. Studio keeps your own manual guides visible above the provider overlay.

• Extend backgrounds through the bleed area to the artwork edge.
• Keep important text, icons, and borders inside the safe guide.
• Treat the trim or die-cut contour as the expected finished edge, while allowing for normal production movement.
• The format picker in Designs labels each format's print guides. Verified guides come from the printer's official template. Estimated guides are Studio's best estimate of the bleed, cut, and safe lines: design and export as normal, but compare your files with the printer's template and preparation notes before you order.

Complex shapes such as circles, triangles, hexagons, flowers, meeples, invaders, and rings can include concave edges, holes, or several printable islands. Their available contours are used consistently by Designer guides, QA containment, transparent PNG masking, PDF finished-shape paths, and the crop preview.

Understand 3D previews

The 3D view is a production aid, not a manufactured proof. Flat cards, tiles, and supported complex contours show the current face and back on a shaped extrusion. When Studio does not have an evidence-backed assembly model for a product, its 3D view is a simplified schematic.

Custom D4, D6, and D8 products have dedicated assembled previews when every required die face is designed. Boxes, books, folded pieces, pawns, standees, dials, and other assemblies may still use a schematic view; confirm folds, joins, materials, thickness, and final construction with the printer's template and a physical proof.

Try the included sample

Import Night Market Rush from the sample library to inspect its The Game Crafter Poker cards, front/back surfaces, and bleed and safe guides. Its tri-fold rule book is a separate generic print-ready design, not a The Game Crafter product profile. Existing imported copies are not resized automatically; reimport the current sample or use Resize and review the result.

Export individual images

1. Choose a design and finish its Export QA review.
2. Use Select to choose the generated pieces for this batch.
3. In Export settings, choose a 900, 500, or 100 DPI preset, or enter a custom 50–1000 DPI value. Lower settings make faster layout proofs; higher settings create larger files for detailed production review.
4. Enable ZIP.
5. Choose the back layout:
   • Single back creates named face files and one shared back image.
   • Back per card creates a folder per piece containing face and back. Studio uses this automatically for unique backs.
6. Choose PNG for lossless production artwork and transparency. Use JPG only for smaller, lossy proofs.
7. Under Guide line, choose the export boundary, then choose Keep artwork or Crop at guide. If the design has a shaped trim or bleed guide, Transparent outside finished shape makes the area outside it transparent in PNG files.
8. Leave Include visible print guides off for clean artwork; enable it only when you deliberately want guides burned into every image.
9. Set the archive name and choose Export batch.

The ZIP contains rendered output, not the source image files from the Assets library.

How Studio builds a PDF

1. Capture the pieces. Studio takes a saved snapshot of the selected rows, Enum variants, faces, and backs. Later edits belong to the next export.
2. Plan the front sheets. The chosen paper, orientation, margins, gap, artwork boundary, and card size determine how many pieces fit on each page. Actual size preserves the design's physical dimensions; Studio reports a page-fit error instead of silently shrinking it.
3. Match the backs. A duplex PDF puts each face page before its back page and mirrors back positions for long-edge duplex printing. Backs as separate PDF keeps the same planned positions in separate face and back files.
4. Add guides and download. Studio adds the chosen crop marks, full-sheet cut lines, or finished-shape contours, builds the PDF, and saves it to the device. Printing happens outside Studio.

The PDF settings preview is the page plan: it shows the paper boundary, printable area, rows and columns, artwork size, and guide placement before any file is built.

Build a PDF sheet

Enable PDF, choose Settings on the PDF card, and use the Sheet preview for page fit. Switch to Sample card when you need to inspect crop, bleed, and cut-line placement. Changes save as you make them; choose Done to close the window.

Page and artwork

• Quick page setups apply a useful group of paper, size, margin, and mark settings. Every value remains editable.
• Paper size must match the physical sheet. Standard sizes use their exact dimensions, for example A4 is 210 × 297 mm and A3 is 297 × 420 mm. Auto orientation uses the direction that fits the most pieces, and when both fit the same number it picks the one that prints them larger; Portrait and Landscape force one direction.
• Margins reserve the printer's unprintable area. Start with Studio's recommendation, then use the printer's specification if it needs more space. When a design has backs, unequal margins on the duplex flip edges (left and right on a portrait sheet, top and bottom on a landscape sheet) are evened out to the larger value so every back lands exactly behind its face; Studio shows a warning when this happens. Face-only designs keep the margins exactly as entered.
• Extra artwork gap adds space between complete artwork boxes. Leave it at zero when neighbouring pieces should share trim edges.
• Guide line chooses Bleed, Trim, or Safe. Artwork outside guide decides whether artwork beyond that boundary is kept or cropped.
• Actual size preserves the designed physical size and blocks a PDF that does not fit. Fit to page deliberately makes a smaller proof.

Cut lines and finished shapes

• Cut lines can be None, Printed under images to keep marks behind card artwork, or Printed over images to keep them visible on top.
• Short crop marks stay close to each cut and keep clear of every piece's artwork, including its bleed. With little or no gap between pieces, marks between neighbours are shortened or left out, and the marks around the outside of the sheet still locate every cut. Full-sheet lines extend shared cuts across the page for a guillotine or production cutter.
• Finished-shape contour adds a supported non-rectangular trim or bleed outline as a vector cut path. It does not replace rectangular marks unless those are turned off. When the chosen guide and Crop at guide remove part of the finished piece (for example Safe on a rounded card), the contour is left out and Studio shows a warning, because it would no longer match the printed artwork.
• Colour and thickness change only the printed guide. Sides to get cut lines chooses face, back, or both.
• Include visible print guides also prints guides that are visible in the design. Leave it off for clean production artwork unless those guides are intentional.

Backs and files

• Rotate backs 180° rotates artwork inside each back slot. It is separate from Studio's long-edge duplex slot mirroring.
• Duplex (face then back) places each face sheet immediately before its matching mirrored back sheet.
• Backs as separate PDF creates one faces file and one backs file while keeping corresponding positions aligned.
• PDF name sets the download name; Studio adds .pdf.

Resolve any blocking page-fit warning, inspect the sheet and sample proof, then export.

The design's Content outside export zone check uses its bleed boundary. PDF page-fit and print-layout warnings are separate and use the PDF settings selected here.

A straightforward first home proof

Choose Letter or A4 paper, Auto orientation, Actual size, the recommended margin, a small gap, and short crop marks. Enable duplex only when the printer supports long-edge duplex reliably. Build one or two pages before preparing the full deck.

Understand snapshots and downloads

When a ZIP or PDF starts, Studio refreshes the chosen design and takes a snapshot. Later edits belong to a new export. If a selected dataset row was removed or changed before the snapshot was prepared, Studio asks you to review the preview and retry.

The export tray renders the pieces, builds the enabled files, and saves them to your device. You can collapse it while working, or choose Cancel export to stop. Completed browser exports also appear in the download history on that device so you can save them again; clearing that history means the files must be generated again.

Export again repeats the completed export's selected rows and settings, but first loads a fresh, authorized snapshot and renders the current design, data, and dependencies. It stops instead of guessing if the design is missing or archived, the dataset changed or disappeared, or a selected row was removed; review the current preview and start a new export in that case.

If an export fails, read the failed step and fix the source or settings before retrying. Repeating the same unresolved binding, unavailable asset, font problem, or invalid page plan produces the same result.

Before rendering, preflight blocks output wider or taller than 16,384 pixels, output beyond the single-render pixel safety budget, and a padded effect raster wider or taller than 16,384 pixels or larger than 16,000,000 pixels. Studio does not silently lower DPI or remove effects. Reduce the output DPI or physical dimensions, or reduce the effect spread, then export again.

Manifest, archive, and assets

The Manifest button downloads JSON containing game records such as designs, datasets, variables, asset records, folders, and fonts. It is useful for inspection or custom tooling, but it is not generated artwork and it does not embed uploaded image or font binaries. Do not rely on it as a directly importable game backup.

Use a game archive when you need to move or preserve the game and its managed files. Use an account export for account-level records. After importing an archive, inspect important images and fonts before deleting the original archive.

Proof before production

1. Open several exported images at 100% and inspect small text, edges, transparency, and image crops.
2. In the system print dialogue, choose the same paper size as the PDF and print at 100% or Actual size. Disable Fit, Scale to fit, Shrink oversized pages, and similar scaling options.
3. For a duplex PDF, choose long-edge duplex and print one sheet pair. Do not print the full deck yet.
4. Measure a finished piece against its intended width and height. A wrong measurement means the printer scaled the page.
5. Hold a face and back to a light, then check order, flip edge, rotation, and alignment.
6. Cut pieces from the centre and edge of the sheet. Check that background artwork reaches the cut and important content stays inside the safe area.
7. Approve the small proof before printing the full run or sending the PDF to a print shop.

Studio does not create SVG card exports.