Is there a free program to make cards?

[torilen]

Okay...so a lot of you all on here make homebrew cards, with
fronts and backs. What programs do you use? Are any of them free
to download?

I need a way to make cards, and powerpoint - which I have used for all
of my writing/publishing purposes so far - just doesn't work for making
cards with fronts and backs.

Thanks.

[knightkrawler]

You take money with your game. I'm sure you can afford an old Photoshop version for 20 bucks to invest in some art.

[whitebeard]

Gimp is free and will let you define layers with boarders to do all of your formatting.

If the art is done and you want to automatically do the text and layout pages, I use LaTeX. I can send you my template, but my cards printed ~10% smaller than they should have (something about margins scaling my image). I am grabbing my PDFs now and converting them for printing with thegamecrafter.com (bridge size). Just a lot of cutting and pasting.

[lestodante]

@torilen do you mean cards for Heroquest or generic cards?
For Heroquest there are several card creators that you can try.

[torilen]

lestodante
Cards in general, really. I was asking here because I know people make a lot of HQ cards.
I think there are one or two programs specifically for HQ cards, though - is that why you asked?

[Anderas]

I first used powerpoint because it is easy to layout and i had a license from my company. however, you have some shortcomings with that one.
Then i used photoshop cs1 which was free for download. Once i had my template finished, it was rather fast to make more cards... editing text is a PITA, though. That, i still do in my Powerpoint and then i copy/paste.