▮ Ink Friendly

Generator · Print-true

Flash card maker

Your list becomes a sheet of cards you can actually cut out and use — fold-over cards that need no double-sided printer, or true two-sided sheets whose backs line up because the columns are reversed for you. Built in your browser at true page size, with nothing uploaded and no account.

Sheet— Layout— Cards— Pages— Seed—
A colon or a tab works instead of the bar, for spreadsheet pastes.

How this generator works

A two-sided card printed on a one-sided machine is a geometry problem, and there are exactly two honest solutions. The first is to not print two sides at all: the fold-over layout gives each card a tall cell divided by a dashed fold line, with the answer above the line set upside down and the prompt below it the right way up. Cut the card out, fold it back along the line, and the answer ends up behind the prompt with both readable. One sheet, one pass through the printer, and nothing to misalign. It is the default here because it works on every printer that exists.

The second solution is a real duplex print, and it is where most printable flash cards quietly fail. A printer flipping a page on its long edge mirrors it left to right — so the card in the top-left corner of the front sheet comes back around behind the card in the top-right position. A back sheet laid out in the same order as the front will therefore print every answer onto the wrong card. This page reverses the column order on the back sheet so they meet correctly, which is a change you cannot see on screen and cannot check until the paper is already through the machine. That is exactly the class of error this site exists to remove: the sheet is drawn in real millimeters, and the arrangement is computed rather than assumed.

The honest limits. The column reversal assumes long-edge binding, which is the default on essentially every consumer printer in portrait; if your driver is set to flip on the short edge, the backs will come out rotated and you will need to change that setting rather than this page. Card text is fitted automatically — kept whole rather than broken mid-word, shrinking until it fits and wrapping to at most four lines — but a card holding a full sentence will end up small, and one that cannot fit at any size is shortened with an ellipsis and reported. And as with every sheet here, the print dialog must be at 100% or "Actual size"; "Fit to page" rescales the sheet and no generator can prevent that from outside the dialog.

Frequently asked questions

How do the backs line up with the fronts?
By reversing the column order on the back sheet. A printer flipping a page on its long edge mirrors it left to right, so the card in the top-left of the front sheet ends up behind the card in the top-right position — which means the back sheet has to be laid out in reverse to match. This page does that for you. It is the single commonest fault in printable flash cards, and you cannot see it until the paper is already through the machine.
Do I need a double-sided printer?
No — that is what the fold-over layout is for, and it is the default. Each card is printed as a single tall cell with the answer above the fold line, upside down, and the prompt below it. Cut the cards out, fold each one back along the dashed line, and the answer sits behind the prompt with both the right way up. One sheet, one pass, no alignment to get wrong.
What format does the card list use?
One card per line, as front | back. A colon or a tab works instead of the bar, so a paste out of a spreadsheet or a notes app usually drops straight in. A line with no separator becomes a card with a blank back, and the page tells you how many of those it found rather than letting you discover it after printing.
How many cards fit on a page, and what happens to long text?
Choose from four cards a page up to twelve; the card size follows from the grid and your margin, so the cards are as large as the layout allows. Text is fitted to its card automatically — kept whole rather than broken mid-word, shrinking until it fits, and wrapping to at most four lines. If something genuinely cannot fit even at the smallest size it is shortened with an ellipsis and the page says so.
Is anything uploaded or stored?
No. Your card list is read by this page, laid out as vector geometry here, and printed through your browser's own dialog. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no account or watermark, and no settings are saved — close the tab and it is gone.

Related tools