Creating New Cards

# Creating New Cards (Czar)

This section talks about how to make new cards. It doesn't tell you how to draw the specific images you want on the cards, though. You probably want to use the latex 'picture' environment for that. (Alternatively, if having already looked at some of the existing card style files you think you understand how they use TeX to format themselves, you could give that a shot; this is probably best done by copying one of them and then experimentally changing things a bit at a time.)

(If you want something that looks like memory packets and ingestibles, see those styles for examples of using mechanics-packet.sty, whose internal documentation you should look at.)

How to make a new type of card:

1. Create your new `mycard.sty` in LaTeX/Styles/; it should start out like the existing card styles:
   `\ProvidesPackage{mycard}
   \RequirePackage{extractable} % if mycard is an extractable
   \RequirePackage[options]{cards}`
   Here options must include exactly one of
   - single single-sided cards have stuff on one only one side (duh)
   - double double-sided cards have different stuff on each side
   - mirror mirror-sided cards have the same stuff on each side
   and may optionally include margin dimensions. If you omit the latter, some default margin space will be left around each card, unless they're single-sided, in which case they'll be tightly packed. If you supply one dimension, it will be used instead; if you supply two dimensions, they will be used as the horizontal and vertical margins. See existing styles. For non-single-sided cards remember that you need front and back to align correctly on the printed page, and that Athena printers may have poor front/back page registration, so use enough margin that printer slop doesn't make cards overlap. We don't recommend using less than the default. (For single-sided cards alignment isn't an issue, which is why those default to tight packing.)

2. Define a macro in `mycard.sty` which:
   - takes the arguments needed
   - calls `\makecard{front side}` (if it's single-sided or mirror-sided)
     or calls `\makecard{front side}{back side}` (if it's double-sided)
     where "front side" and "back side" are each code that draws that side of the card (perhaps using the picture environment). Since cards.sty will automatically draw a frame large enough for each side to fit in and center each within it, you don't need to worry about those issues.

3. You're done card-wise. If you want this to be an extractable, see tex-extractable.html (or just possibly list-extractable.html) for those issues.

To use your new style in a .tex file, just put `\usepackage{mycard}` after the `\documentclass{game}` in the preamble. To use it in another style file, just `\RequirePackage{mycard}` there.