My latest card and board games include ready-to-be-printed sheets of game cards and other components. Here is the guidelines how to use them most effectually.
Prints are usually in gnuzipped tar file. So, to unpack them in
Unix machine, use either tar zvxf file (gnu tar) or
gunzip file and then tar xvf
file.
In Windows, WinZip or PowerArchiver
should do the trick. In addition, you might need
Ghostview (gv) to watch and print
the source postscript files, as in most systems you simply cannot
drag postscript files to printers (like in Unix).
In most cases, they can be printed either as black-and-white picture or as color picture (preferred). When printing please note that the quality of the paper affects the output very much, and colors usually look quite different when printed. You may also need to tweak your printer settings, too, at least I had to double the gamma value when printing various cards to get a bit better result.
Now that you have the prints, there is several ways to use them. For counters etc. the basic choice is to glue them into something thicker and then cut them from the sheets.
For playing cards, two good choices exist:
If the game includes several different kind of cards, you need different backs for each. So use differently colored backs or if using slipped-in cards, slip some colored paper on the other side or use cards from different games. Some prints also include ready back-sides which can be used, too.
In addition to various game cards of different games, I also provide ready-to-print rulebooks. These rulebooks are usually as pre-rendered Postscript, with A4 sized pages, double-sided and 4 pages per sheet. Thus they can be easily knitted into A5 sided book.
For those without postscript printer able to do double-sided printing or A4, I'm sorry. Yell to me and maybe I will start to provide other formats, too.