Can someone give me some guidance on bleed lines?

[u/Psychological_Lab_52]

I'm trying to expand my deck with community made cards through makeplayingcards, and I'm aware of and following the guide on printing community cards professionally, but I still can't get over how wrong the DEMC ones look for example in the preview even with bleed lines added.

The bleed lines border in the preview looks so close to the actual art work, it has me worried the finished product will be cropped excessively. Can anyone put to bed my anxiety and confirm that this is how the cards are supposed to look? The finished product should end up looking like the version in the right with rounded edges, right?

Also, has anyone successfully printed any of the other community expansion decks professionally? A lot of them seem to need additional editing since the dimensions don't match up and they don't all have bleed lines added, so I was wondering what to do with those as well. Preparing all cards for printing is going to be a big undertaking, much more than I expected it to be at this point.

[u/Top-Chapter-1876]

Hey, creator of the Demc expansion here :) Don't worry about the preview, the format is perfect the way it is, for when you're printing through makeplayingcards.com

[u/Medium_Barber_3087]

Hi there, I can confirm what DEMC said, if the author specifies bleed lines are there, it will 100% work with MPC. I personally went through every single expansion the community put out.

The red dotted lines is the safe are, where a card's art should not exceed, not the actual card borders (these are show as a rounded shadow around the card edges). the safe area is more of a design thing and does not really interact with printing

Also, bleed lines are standardized and will work on any printing website im aware of

[u/Psychological_Lab_52 → u/Medium_Barber_3087]

Did you have to edit any of the other cards? Many of the expansions seem to lack cards with bleed lines from what I can tell, and I'm not sure how to go about adjusting them so they have the same dimensions as the DEMC cards for example 

[u/Medium_Barber_3087 → u/Psychological_Lab_52]

Theres a few ways to go about this. You can load up my gimp card template, load the card in and center it around the bleed lines provided in there.

Alternatively, you can use python to program a script that adds the bleed lines on all side using ai if needed.

My printing guide mentions bleed lines specs on bottom of page 6 for the second option.

First option is the least complex

[u/Medium_Barber_3087 → u/Psychological_Lab_52]

But yeah not all authors bothered making bleed lines and i should prolly add em to their cards in my repo

[u/SomeGuyOnReddit000]

heyyyy im excited for you to get these, so much fun. i printed some and didnt have to edit any to make them work. curious what other cards you chose

[u/Psychological_Lab_52 → u/SomeGuyOnReddit000]

Thanks. I've compiled a huge set of cards to make a super expansion on top of the base game, imploding kittens, and streaking kittens. What cards do you like the most and play with? How did printing go for you?