How to print business cards or labels several to a sheet

You have one card, as a PDF with bleed: 91 × 61 mm for an 85 × 55 mm business card with 3 mm on each side (how to add bleed and crop marks covers that). Now you want a sheet of them with crop marks, to print on an office printer and cut, or because a copy shop asked for an imposed sheet.

Ask the copy shop first. Many printers lay out the sheet themselves and only want the single card with bleed. When they do ask for a sheet, ask for their sheet size, gutter and margin, and use those numbers below.

Gutter or no gutter

Bleed is what makes this more than a grid. Each card's background runs 3 mm past its trim, so two cards placed trim to trim overlap by 6 mm, and whichever is drawn last paints its bleed over the edge of its neighbour. There are two clean ways out:

• A gutter of twice the bleed (6 mm). The bleeds meet in the middle of the gutter, every card keeps all of its bleed, and you make two cuts per gutter. This is the safe layout for anything with colour or a photo to the edge.
• Trims butted, no bleed between cards. One cut between neighbours, so a cut that drifts shows a sliver of the next card instead of white paper. That only works when the edges that meet are the same flat colour, or white. A card with a coloured band down its left edge is the counter-example: butted, the band sits right against the previous card's right edge.

How many fit

Across a sheet, n cards and n − 1 gutters have to fit inside the sheet minus a margin on both sides: n × card + (n − 1) × gutter ≤ sheet − 2 × margin. Here is that worked out for an 85 × 55 mm card with a 10 mm margin all round, which holds the 3 mm outer bleed and crop marks 2 mm beyond it. "Turned" means the card rotated a quarter turn on the sheet.

The classic ten on A4 only works butted: five rows of 55 mm are 275 mm, and four 6 mm gutters would make it 299 mm, more than the sheet. A US 3.5 × 2 in card fits ten on Letter butted (2 × 5) and eight with 1/4 in gutters. SRA3 is the press sheet a little larger than A3, and it holds 21 upright cards with or without gutters.

Lay out the sheet with pdfjam

pdfjam places PDF pages on a sheet in a grid. It is a front end to LaTeX's pdfpages, so it comes with TeX Live: apt install texlive-extra-utils texlive-latex-recommended on Debian and Ubuntu, MacTeX on a Mac.

pdfjam --nup 2x4 --a4paper --noautoscale true card.pdf 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 -o sheet.pdf

What pdfjam does by default, measured on a rendered sheet:

• It scales. Without --noautoscale true, --nup 2x5 on A4 shrinks every page to fit a 105 × 59.4 mm cell: 97.4 %, so the card's trim comes out at 82.8 × 53.6 mm. A card that is 2 mm short is the most common way this goes wrong.
• It keeps the bleed. It places the whole page, bleed included, and puts the pages edge to edge. A card with 3 mm bleed therefore lands with exactly the 6 mm double-cut gutter, with no --delta needed.
• It doesn't check the fit. At 100 %, five rows of 61 mm are 305 mm. pdfjam centres that on 297 mm and lets the top and bottom rows run 4 mm off the sheet, with no warning.

The other layouts from the table:

# 9 on A4, cards turned a quarter turn, 6 mm gutters
pdfjam --nup 3x3 --a4paper --noautoscale true --angle 90 card.pdf 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 -o sheet9.pdf

# 10 on A4, trims butted: the bleed is cut off every card
pdfjam --nup 2x5 --a4paper --noautoscale true --trim '3mm 3mm 3mm 3mm' --clip true \
  card.pdf 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 -o sheet10.pdf

# 21 on SRA3, 6 mm gutters
pages=$(yes 1 | head -21 | paste -sd,)
pdfjam --nup 3x7 --papersize '{320mm,450mm}' --noautoscale true card.pdf "$pages" -o sra3.pdf

--trim takes 3 mm off each side of the page, and --clip true is what stops the trimmed bleed from being drawn anyway. Without it, every card's bleed paints 3 mm over its neighbour's trim. pdfjam can't trim only the inner edges, so the butted sheet has no bleed on its outside edges either.

--delta '6mm 6mm' adds space between the placed pages. Use it for cards with no bleed at all, to get a white gap for double cuts. On cards that have bleed it only widens the gutter.

For two-sided cards, put the front on page 1 and the back on page 2, and list both: pdfjam makes one sheet of fronts and one of backs.

pages=$( (yes 1 | head -8; yes 2 | head -8) | paste -sd, )
pdfjam --nup 2x4 --a4paper --noautoscale true card-2sided.pdf "$pages" -o duplex.pdf

The block is centred on both sheets, so when the paper turns over on its long edge, the backs land behind the fronts. For different names on each card or label, make one page per card and leave out the page list: pdfjam fills the sheet in page order, left to right and top to bottom.

Add crop marks around the outside

On an imposed sheet, the crop marks go in the margin round the block, one pair at the ends of every cut line. None go between the cards, where they would be printed onto a neighbour's bleed. This Ghostscript script draws them. It is the grid version of the single-card script in the bleed guide, with the same 5 mm marks starting 2 mm outside the bleed. Save it as sheetmarks.ps:

%!PS
% Crop marks around a sheet of cards that pdfjam laid out (it centres the block).
% Sizes in mm: TRIMW x TRIMH is one card as placed, COLS x ROWS the grid,
% GUTTER the gap between neighbouring trims, BLEED the bleed round the outside.
% Every cut line gets a mark at both ends, outside the block. None go between cards.
/mm { 72 mul 25.4 div } def
/GAP 2 def                                  % gap between bleed edge and mark (mm)
/LEN 5 def                                  % mark length (mm)
/OFF BLEED GAP add def                      % trim edge to start of mark
/BW COLS TRIMW mul COLS 1 sub GUTTER mul add def               % block of trims
/BH ROWS TRIMH mul ROWS 1 sub GUTTER mul add def
/vmark { /x exch def                        % a cut at x: ticks below and above
  newpath x mm Y0 OFF sub mm moveto 0 LEN neg mm rlineto stroke
  newpath x mm Y0 BH add OFF add mm moveto 0 LEN mm rlineto stroke } def
/hmark { /y exch def                        % a cut at y: ticks left and right
  newpath X0 OFF sub mm y mm moveto LEN neg mm 0 rlineto stroke
  newpath X0 BW add OFF add mm y mm moveto LEN mm 0 rlineto stroke } def
<< /EndPage {
     exch pop 0 eq dup {
       gsave initgraphics
       currentpagedevice /PageSize get aload pop               % this sheet, in mm
         25.4 mul 72 div /SH exch def  25.4 mul 72 div /SW exch def
       /X0 SW BW sub 2 div def  /Y0 SH BH sub 2 div def        % block corner
       [ /Separation /All /DeviceCMYK { dup dup dup } ] setcolorspace 1 setcolor
       0.25 setlinewidth
       0 1 COLS 1 sub { TRIMW GUTTER add mul X0 add dup vmark TRIMW add vmark } for
       0 1 ROWS 1 sub { TRIMH GUTTER add mul Y0 add dup hmark TRIMH add hmark } for
       grestore
     } if
   }
>> setpagedevice

Give it the card as it sits on the sheet, the grid, the gutter and the outer bleed, all in millimetres:

gs -o sheet-marks.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/None \
   -dTRIMW=85 -dTRIMH=55 -dCOLS=2 -dROWS=4 -dGUTTER=6 -dBLEED=3 \
   sheetmarks.ps -f sheet.pdf
pdfinfo sheet-marks.pdf | grep 'Page size'

Page size:       595.28 x 841.89 pts (A4)

Rendered at 254 dpi, the marks above the cards sit at 17, 102, 108 and 193 mm, exactly on the trims pdfjam placed. For the turned layout pass -dTRIMW=55 -dTRIMH=85 -dCOLS=3 -dROWS=3. For the butted one pass -dGUTTER=0 -dBLEED=0, since its outside edges have no bleed left.

Keep -dAutoRotatePages=/None. Ghostscript otherwise turns a page to suit the direction of its text, and on the sheet of turned cards it marked the whole A4 page as landscape.

In a design app, InDesign's Edit › Step and Repeat with Create as a grid, or Scribus's Multiple Duplicate, will repeat a placed card PDF across a page. Both apps put their crop marks round the page, though, not round each card, so you draw the cut marks yourself.

Printing it at home or in the office

Pre-cut card and label sheets (perforated cards, peel-off labels) already have a layout. Use the template from the sheet's maker, not your own grid: its positions are where the perforations are.

Cutting

With a guillotine or a trimmer, line the blade up with a pair of marks and cut right across the sheet. Do all the cuts in one direction first. The marks for the other direction were on the side margins you just cut away, so cut the strips by measurement: the card's size, then 6 mm off for each gutter, or the card's size again for the butted layout.

Without a terminal

Our browser tools can merge and reorder PDF pages, but none of them puts several pages on one sheet, so there is no browser tool of ours for this job.

Popcorn is a print editor that runs in the browser, and it has an 85 × 55 mm business card preset. Its step and repeat is part of the CMYK print export, so it needs the paid plan; designing is free. In the export you pick the sheet, then Auto N-up to fit as many as possible, or Grid for set rows and columns, and a gutter and margin in millimetres. Set the gutter to 6 mm, twice the bleed, and the margin to 10 mm: on SRA3 that makes 21 cards, 3 × 7, as in the table. Popcorn warns when the gutter is smaller than the bleed. It doesn't turn the card, so draw the card the way round you want it on the sheet.

Its crop marks are round the outside only: each cut line is marked at both ends in the margin, and nothing is drawn between the cards. They start 3 mm out from the trim (the mark offset) and are 6.35 mm long, so a 10 mm margin holds them.

Before you print the run

The card itself still has to pass the printer's checks for colour, resolution and fonts. How to make a print-ready PDF goes through them in order.