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Generator · Print-true

Printable name cards

Tent place cards that read from both sides of the table, gift tags with the punch mark in the right place, and blank cards to write on by hand. Every card size is stated in millimetres and drawn at true page size, and the names you type never leave your device.

Sheet— Card— Cards— Pages— Seed—
Blank prints one full sheet and ignores the name list.
Printed on every card, under the name.
Fixes the shuffled order, so a spoiled sheet reprints identically. With the order as typed it changes nothing.
A comma also starts a new card, so keep surnames on the same line as their first name.

How this generator works

A card here is a rectangle of stated millimetres rather than one that lands wherever the printer happens to put it. The printable area is your paper minus your margin, the layout divides it exactly, and the readout reports the result: on US Letter with a 12.7 mm margin, six cards a sheet are 95.3 × 84.7 mm flat and fold to a tent 95.3 mm wide by 42.3 mm tall, which is close to the traditional 3.5 by 2 inch place card. Cut guides are hairlines drawn on the true card boundary rather than a little way inside it, so a cut that follows the line gives a card of the size the readout claims. The whole sheet is SVG in real millimetres inside a viewBox equal to the physical page, and nothing is ever scaled to fit.

The tent card is the reason this page exists. A place card is read from both sides of the table, so the name is printed twice and the half above the fold is drawn rotated 180 degrees about its own centre; fold along the dashed line and both faces stand upright. Most printable place-card templates print the name once, which leaves a blank card pointing at whoever sits opposite. The two guide marks are deliberately unalike so they cannot be confused — a cut is a solid hairline on the boundary, a fold is a dashed rule across the middle — because folding along a cut line, or cutting along a fold, wastes the sheet. Names are fitted arithmetically rather than measured, since this mono face advances a stable 0.6 em per character and a name can therefore be sized to its card before anything is painted. The seed that fixes the order the names land in is stamped in the page margin, outside every card, because event stationery should carry nothing but the name.

The honest limits. Card stock over about 200 gsm jams many domestic printers, and a duplex unit jams sooner than a straight single-sided path because the paper has to turn back on itself; 160 to 200 gsm is the range that both feeds reliably and stands up on a table. A tent card only stands straight if the fold is at the exact middle, which means printing at 100% or Actual size — Fit to page rescales the sheet and moves the fold off centre, and no generator can prevent that from outside the print dialog. Long names shrink rather than wrap, and capitals under about 4 mm tall stop being readable from the far side of a table, so the page warns you instead of letting you find out once the guests are seated; fewer cards a sheet is the fix. Cut guides cost a hairline of ink at every card edge, so switch them off and cut to a ruler if you want an edge with nothing printed on it. And the name list keeps one card per distinct name, so two guests called the same thing merge into a single card unless you tell them apart.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the name print twice, with the top half upside down?
Because a tent card is read from both sides of the table. Fold along the dashed line and the two halves stand back to back, so the half above the fold is drawn rotated 180 degrees about its own centre — once it is folded, the guest and the person opposite each see an upright name. A template that prints the name once leaves a blank face pointing at somebody. It is the commonest fault in printable place cards and you cannot see it until the folding is done.
What size are the cards, and how heavy can the paper be?
The card size follows from your paper, margin and layout, and the readout states it in millimetres. On US Letter with a 12.7 mm margin, six cards a sheet gives 95.3 × 84.7 mm flat, folding to a tent 95.3 mm wide and 42.3 mm tall — close to the traditional 3.5 by 2 inch place card. Card stock up to about 200 gsm feeds through most domestic printers; above that the rollers begin to slip and jam, and a duplex unit jams sooner than a straight single-sided path because the paper has to turn back on itself.
Where does the hole go on a gift tag?
On the centre line, 8 mm below the top edge, marked by a dashed 6 mm circle. Six millimetres is the hole a standard office punch cuts, and 8 mm from the edge leaves 5 mm of card between the hole and the edge, which is about the least that survives being pulled on by a ribbon. The circle marks where to punch — it is not a ring printed around a hole you have already made. Tick the To and From rules if you would rather write the names on afterwards, and leave the name list empty to get a sheet of blank tags to keep in a drawer.
What happens to a long name?
It shrinks to fit rather than running off the card, wrapping to at most two lines and never breaking a word in half unless a single word is longer than the card at any size. Capitals printed under about 4 mm tall stop being legible from the far side of a dinner table, so the page warns you when a name has shrunk past that point instead of letting you discover it at the table. The fix is fewer cards a sheet, or landscape. Anything that cannot fit even at the smallest size is shortened with an ellipsis and reported.
Is anything uploaded or stored?
No. Your guest 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.

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