Place Cards & Table Tents

This is the longer read behind the place card maker. It covers what a folded card has to do, why the back half is turned rather than mirrored, how a pasted or dropped guest list becomes a stack of cards, how many fit on a sheet, and what to check before you commit a hundred of them to card stock.

The millimetres inside a 90 by 55 card

Nothing on a card face has a fixed size. Every measurement is a fraction of the card, so a small place card and a large table tent are set out by the same handful of numbers. The standard card is 90 mm wide and 55 mm tall, so that is the one worth walking through.

First comes the frame. The inset is the larger of 2.2 mm and 7.5 per cent of the shorter side, which on this card is 4.125 mm. The side padding is the larger of 3.5 mm and 10.5 per cent of the shorter side, so 5.775 mm, and the wording is left a column 78.45 mm wide. Height works the same way. Take the card height, then take off the inset twice and a small extra twice, that extra being 3 per cent of the height but never more than 2.2 mm. On a 55 mm card that leaves 43.45 mm of usable height.

Then the starting type sizes, all read off the card height:

Each line of type occupies its own size times 1.18. The gaps between blocks are fractions of that 5.775 mm figure: 0.7 of it under the small heading, 0.5 under the name, and 0.28 under the table line. The date sits last and has no gap after it.

So take a card with a heading, a name that fits on one line at full size, a table line and a date. The block adds up like this. Heading 4.125 times 1.18 is 4.87. Gap 4.04. Name 13.2 times 1.18 is 15.58. Gap 2.89. Table line 5.775 times 1.18 is 6.81. Gap 1.62. Date 4.62 times 1.18 is 5.45. Total 41.26 mm.

That is inside the 43.45 mm budget, so nothing is squeezed. The whole block is then centred rather than hung from the top: 55 less 41.26, halved, puts it 6.87 mm down from the top edge. Type sits on a baseline eight tenths of its size below the top of its line, so the heading's baseline lands 10.17 mm down.

Now add a second line of text for the same guest, say a meal choice. That adds 5.59 mm of type and another 1.62 mm gap, and the block grows to 48.46 mm. It no longer fits. So one factor is worked out, 43.45 divided by 48.46, which is 0.897, and every size and every gap on that face is multiplied by it. The name that wanted 13.2 mm is drawn at 11.84 mm. Nothing is allowed to stray past the border, so the whole face gives way together rather than one line poking out.

Width is handled separately, and first. A line is measured at its starting size on an off-screen canvas, using the same font stack the card will be drawn with. If it is wider than the 78.45 mm column, the size is multiplied by the column width divided by the measured width. Twelve per cent too wide means twelve per cent smaller, near enough.

The interesting part is the name, because there are two ways to rescue a long one and they cannot both be right. So the card is built both ways. One version keeps the name on a single line and shrinks it. The other breaks it over two lines, trying every gap between words and keeping the split whose wider half is narrowest. Both versions are then squeezed to the height budget, and the sizes that come out the far end are compared. The bigger one is drawn. A tie goes to the single line, because the wrapped version has to be strictly larger to win. A hyphenated name with no spaces in it is split at the hyphen, and the hyphen stays on the first line.

The small supporting lines follow a gentler rule. They only wrap if wrapping buys them more than 15 per cent extra size, because a two line table label costs height that the name would rather have.

Set every name at the same size, which is on by default, runs that whole fitting job once per guest before anything is drawn. It keeps the smallest final size on the list and uses it as the ceiling for every card. That pass covers the entire list, not the four sheets on screen, so the preview cannot promise letters the printer will not deliver.

• The name starts at 24 per cent of the card height, times the name size slider, so 13.2 mm at the default of 100 per cent. It is never set below 2.5 mm, and never above 55 per cent of the height. The slider itself runs from 40 to 160 per cent.
• The small heading above the name starts at 7.5 per cent of the height and is capped at 5 mm, so 4.125 mm here.
• The table line starts at 10.5 per cent of the height and is capped at 6.5 mm, so 5.775 mm here.
• The date is eight tenths of the table line, so 4.62 mm. A second line of text is 0.82 of it, so 4.74 mm.
• A back face set to show the table alone starts at 20 per cent of the height instead of 24.
• The name is always drawn bold and the supporting lines are always normal weight. There is no control for that.
• Letter spacing runs from 0 to 2.0 mm in tenths, and the default is 0.2 mm. Measuring counts the gaps between letters, one fewer than the letters themselves, while the drawing adds a gap after every letter including the last. Centred text is therefore nudged right by half a gap to put it back in the middle.

Counting cards onto a sheet, and the point where it gives up

A card asks the paper for its own width and, if it folds, twice its height. The 90 by 55 card therefore wants a footprint of 90 by 110 mm. Around that block the page keeps a fixed 10 mm margin, which cannot be changed, and it leaves a gap between neighbours of 8 mm when marks are on and 4 mm when they are off.

Counting is then a division. The number of columns is the usable width plus one gap, divided by the card width plus one gap, rounded down. The spare gap in the sum is there because the last column in a row needs no gap after it. Rows are counted the same way against the usable height.

The sheet is tried both ways round, portrait and landscape, and whichever holds more cards is kept. A draw stays portrait, because portrait is tried first.

Work the default through. A4 is 210 by 297, so portrait leaves 190 by 277 usable. Columns: 190 plus 8 is 198, divided by 90 plus 8, which is 2.02, so 2 columns. Rows: 277 plus 8 is 285, divided by 110 plus 8, which is 2.41, so 2 rows. Four cards. Turned on its side the same sheet gives 2 columns but only 1 row, so 2 cards, and portrait keeps the job.

Whatever is left over is shared evenly, so the block of cards is centred instead of pushed into a corner. Two cards and a gap come to 188 mm across, leaving 11 mm at each side. Down the page, 220 plus 8 is 228 mm, leaving 34.5 mm top and bottom. Because the columns were counted against the margin in the first place, cards can never end up closer to the edge than those 10 mm. Eighty guests at four per sheet is twenty sheets, and that is the figure the header shows.

The A7 tent shows why both orientations are tried. It is 105 by 74, so it needs 105 by 148 mm of paper. Portrait manages one column and one row, which is a single card on a whole sheet of A4. Landscape gives 285 divided by 113, which is 2.52, so two columns, and the page quietly turns itself sideways to print twice as many. The pair then starts 39.5 mm in from the left and 31 mm down.

The A5 tent is where the counting runs out. At 210 by 148 it needs 210 by 296 mm of paper, and A4 offers 277 mm of usable height in portrait and 190 mm in landscape. Neither fits, so the count comes out at zero and you get a plain warning instead of a broken sheet with cards hanging off it. A3 takes exactly one. The same card unfolded, as a flat 210 by 148, does fit one to a sheet of A4 in landscape.

Crop ticks are 2.6 mm long and start 0.9 mm clear of each corner, so they sit in the gap or the margin and never touch the card. A folded card also gets a tick on each side at the fold height. If the gap were ever too tight to hold a tick, the ticks would be dropped rather than printed across the artwork. The furthest a tick reaches is 3.5 mm into the margin, which leaves 6.5 mm of bare paper at the very edge, and that is inside what nearly every desktop printer can reach.

The image files are worked out from the same millimetres. Pixels are the millimetres divided by 25.4 and multiplied by the chosen resolution. The 90 by 110 mm card at 300 dots per inch comes out 1063 by 1299 pixels, and at 600 it is 2126 by 2598.

There is a ceiling on that, because a browser canvas has a limit and this one is set at 16,777,216 pixels of area. Sheet images are held to 300 dots per inch even if you pick 600, and an A3 sheet at 300 still bumps the ceiling. It wants 3508 by 4961, which is about 17.4 million, so it comes back at 3444 by 4870, or roughly 294 dots per inch. An A4 sheet at 300 is 2480 by 3508 and passes untouched.

• Four hundred names is the hard stop. Lines past that are dropped and a notice says so. A dropped file is also cut at 200,000 characters.
• The preview draws at most four sheets and builds only the cards on them. Printing and the two downloads build the whole list.
• The list under the preview shows at most 120 names, and the count per table only appears when there are 40 groups or fewer.
• A custom card can be 25 to 400 mm wide and 20 to 400 mm tall. Anything typed outside that is pulled back to the nearest end.
• The date is only checked for a month of 1 to 12 and a day of 1 to 31, so 31 February is accepted and printed as typed. The weekday format is the one to watch, because the weekday comes from the real calendar date the browser lands on, which for an impossible date is not the day you meant.
• Setting the back to blank still prints the border on that half. It empties the wording, not the card.
• With the same-size option turned off, a back face showing the name alone can print larger than the front, because it has fewer lines competing for the height.
• That same option cuts both ways. The fitting pass counts every line on a card, so one guest with a long second line can pull the name size down for the whole set.
• Fonts are whatever the machine already has. Each choice is a list of faces with a plain fallback at the end, so a computer without Palatino measures and draws the next one along. The preview, the print and the PNG agree with each other, but another computer may fit the same name a little differently.

The small job a place card has to do

A place card looks like the simplest thing at a wedding. It has one name on it. But it is doing two jobs at once, and only one of them is obvious.

The first job is telling a guest where to sit. They walk in, they scan the tables, they find their name, they sit down. For that, a flat card lying on the plate is enough.

The second job starts once everyone is seated. Nobody remembers the name of the person across the table. They will not ask again after the first ten minutes, and they will spend the whole meal quietly hoping someone else says it. A card that faces only one way is no help at all here, because the person who needs to read it is sitting opposite.

That is why place cards are folded. A folded card stands up like a small tent and shows a face in each direction. The guest sees their own name as they arrive. Everyone across the table sees it for the rest of the evening.

The same shape does other work too. Offices use table tents for meeting room numbers. Cafés use them for the wifi password or the special of the day. Conferences use them for speaker names on a panel, where the audience needs the name and the speaker's neighbour does too. The tool here treats all of these as the same object: one piece of card, one fold, two faces.

Why the back half is turned, not mirrored

Almost everyone describes the back of a tent card as mirrored. It is worth being precise here, because if you actually mirror it the name prints backwards and you find out after the card stock is used up.

Try it with a scrap of paper. Write a name across the bottom half the normal way up. Now write the same name in the top half, but rotated so it looks upside down to you. Fold the sheet across the middle so both written faces end up on the outside. Stand it up. Both names now read correctly, one from each side.

The reason is worth a moment. Folding swings the top half about the fold line. That line runs left to right, so the fold turns the back face over top-to-bottom. What was pointing up is now pointing down. At the same time, the person reading the back is standing on the other side of the table, so their left is your right. Left and right swap as well.

Two reversals in a row make a half turn. That is the transform the tool applies: it draws the back face rotated by a hundred and eighty degrees. A mirror reverses one direction and leaves the other alone, which is exactly what produces backwards letters. The two are not the same operation, even though people use the words as though they were.

If your card style has a border with a top and a bottom, or a coloured band along one edge, this matters visually too. Because the whole face is turned, the band ends up along the top edge of both faces once the card is standing. Turning only the text would leave one face with the band at the bottom.

Getting your list into the page

The big box on the left takes one guest per line. That is the whole requirement. Paste a column straight out of a spreadsheet and it will work.

You can add more to each line. A comma after the name adds a table: type Nina Kaur, 2 and the card gets a small line reading Table 2 underneath the name. A third field becomes a smaller second line, which is handy for a meal choice, a role such as Best Man, or a room number for a conference.

Some names contain a comma. Rees-Mogg, Jacob is a real way of writing a name in a list. If you type that, the page has no way to know you did not mean a table called Jacob. So you can use a vertical bar instead of a comma: Rees-Mogg, Jacob | 4 keeps the name whole. Tab characters and semicolons work as separators too, which covers the way spreadsheets in different countries export their files.

Dropping a file onto the box below does the same thing from a saved CSV. A header row called Name, Guest or Full Name is spotted and skipped, so you do not have to delete it first. Fields wrapped in double quotes are read properly, including quotes inside quotes, because that is how a spreadsheet escapes them.

A line beginning with a hash is ignored. That is a quiet but useful feature: when someone drops out three days before the event, you can put a hash in front of them rather than deleting the line. If they come back, you take the hash away.

The list is capped at four hundred cards in one run. Past that, a browser tab spends a long time drawing pictures, and the honest answer is to split a very large event into two runs.

Order on the page, order on the day

The Print in this order control has four settings, and the right one depends on what happens after the cards come off the guillotine.

As typed keeps your list exactly as you wrote it. Choose this when the list is already in an order that means something to you, for example the order you walked round the seating plan.

The two alphabetical settings differ in a way worth knowing. A–Z by the whole name sorts on the first letter of the first name, so Amelia comes before Beatrice. A–Z by last word of the name sorts on the surname instead. The second one is not perfect. It takes the last word, which gets Kaur and Whitfield right but files van der Berg under Berg. For a mixed international guest list, sorting by first name is often the less annoying choice.

By table, then by surname is the setting to use if you are laying up the room yourself. The cards come out of the printer grouped by table, so the cut stack can be carried round the room one table at a time. Numbers sort as numbers here, so table 9 comes before table 12 rather than after it, which a plain alphabetical sort would get wrong. Anything that is not a number, such as Top table, sorts to the end.

Under the preview there is a small summary of the list, with a count per table. It is worth a glance. A table with eleven people at it when you planned eight is usually a typing mistake, and it is far cheaper to spot it here than at the venue.

Card size, and how many fit on a sheet

The size you choose is the size of the card standing up: what a guest sees. A folded card needs twice that height of paper, because the back face is printed above the front one. The page tells you both figures, so there is no arithmetic to do.

Ninety by fifty-five millimetres is the usual wedding place card. Four of those fit on a sheet of A4. Eighty-five by fifty is a little smaller, which is worth having when the tables are crowded with glasses and there is genuinely nowhere to put anything.

The larger sizes are table tents rather than place cards. An A6 tent, a hundred and forty-eight by a hundred and five, is a good size for a meeting room number or a buffet label. An A5 tent, two hundred and ten by a hundred and forty-eight, uses a whole sheet of A4 for one card and can be read across a room.

The packing is worked out for you. The page tries the sheet both portrait and landscape and keeps whichever fits more cards, leaves a ten millimetre margin all round for the printer's own unprintable edge, and puts a gap between cards so there is room to cut. If you choose a custom size too big for the paper, it says so plainly instead of drawing a broken sheet.

Names that will not fit

This is the part of the job that turns a nice design into a fiddly afternoon. Most names are short. Then you reach Bartholomew Fitzwilliam-Harrington and the card that looked lovely five names ago has letters running off both edges.

There are only two ways out, and they pull against each other. You can make the name smaller and keep it on one line. Or you can keep the letters big and break the name over two lines. Which one looks better cannot be decided from the width alone, because two lines take twice the height and might not fit either.

So the tool tries both. It lays out the whole card each way, squeezes the result down if the block is taller than the space inside the border, and then compares how big the letters actually ended up. Whichever way leaves the name physically larger is the one it draws. A name with a hyphen and no spaces, which cannot be split at a space, is broken at the hyphen instead, and the hyphen is kept on the first line where it belongs.

There is one more control that matters more than it looks. Set every name at the same size is on by default. With it off, each card is fitted on its own, so short names come out large and long ones come out small. On a single card that looks fine. Laid along a table it looks like a mistake. With it on, the size the longest name needs is used for everybody, and the whole set looks deliberate.

Letter spacing is the other lever. A small amount of extra space between letters, around half a millimetre, gives short names an elegant, engraved look. Turn it back down for long names, because every extra gap is width you no longer have. ALL CAPITALS costs width too: capitals are wider than lower case, so a name that fits on one line in mixed case may not fit in capitals.

Borders, colour and the ink you are about to use

Ten border styles are on offer, from a single hairline rule to scalloped edges and small leaf sprigs. They are drawn rather than pasted in, so they scale properly with the card and stay crisp at any size.

Three colours control the look: one for the name, one for the accent, and one for the card itself. The accent colour is used for the border, the small line above the name, the table line and the date. Keeping those in one colour is what makes a card look designed rather than assembled.

The default is a soft antique gold on white, which prints well and does not drink ink. Think carefully before choosing a dark card colour. A hundred cards with a deep background will empty an inkjet cartridge, and the paper will cockle as it dries. The tidier route is to buy coloured card and leave the background white in the design, so the printer only puts down the letters.

There is a cutting reason too. If the background is coloured and your cut wanders by a millimetre, you get a thin white sliver along one edge, and it is visible from across the room. A white background with a border inset from the edge is much more forgiving, because a slightly wonky cut just changes the width of a white margin nobody was measuring.

The leaf sprig and solid band styles take up space inside the card, so the wording is given a smaller area to sit in when either is chosen. That is deliberate. It is the difference between a design and a collision.

Fold ticks, crop ticks and cutting a stack

With marks turned on, each card gets four sets of crop ticks at its corners and two fold ticks at the sides. Every one of them sits in the gap between cards or in the margin. Nothing is printed across the card itself.

That is a deliberate choice, and it is different from what many templates do. A dashed line drawn across the middle of the card is easy to follow, but it is also printed on the finished card, and a grey dashed line running across a guest's name is not a good look. Two small ticks at the edges tell you exactly where the fold goes without leaving a mark where it will be seen.

Score the fold before you fold it. Run the back of a butter knife or an empty ballpoint along a ruler between the two fold ticks. Card that has been scored folds along a clean straight line. Card that has not been scored cracks, and the crack shows as a ragged white line along the ridge, which is the single most common way a home-made place card looks home-made.

Cut on the outside of the crop ticks. If you are trimming with a guillotine, line the blade up with the pair of ticks on the far edge rather than eyeballing the middle of the gap, and you can cut a stack of ten sheets at once with everything still square.

Card has a grain, like wood. It folds cleanly along the grain and roughly across it. If your first fold cracks badly, turn the sheet ninety degrees, print again in the other orientation and try once more. Most A4 card is long grain, which folds neatly across the short way.

Printing at the true size

The sheets are drawn in millimetres and the paper size is declared for the printer, so a card marked ninety millimetres wide really is ninety millimetres wide. That only survives if the printer is told to leave it alone.

Find the scaling setting in the print dialogue and set it to a hundred per cent, or Actual size. What you are avoiding is Fit to page or Shrink to fit, which quietly reduces everything by a few per cent to fit inside the printer's own margins. The result still looks perfectly good, and every card is the wrong size. You will not notice until you try to slot them into card holders that no longer fit.

Print one test sheet on ordinary paper first. Hold a ruler against a card. If the width is right, load the card stock. This costs one sheet of paper and thirty seconds, and it catches both of the expensive mistakes: a printer that scaled the page, and a name spelt wrong on every single card.

Nothing here needs a double-sided printer. Every sheet prints on one side only. The fold is what puts artwork on both faces of the finished card, which is another quiet advantage of the tent shape over a flat card printed front and back.

For weight, aim for two hundred and fifty to three hundred grams per square metre. Below about two hundred, a folded card slumps forward and lies down on the plate within the hour. Ordinary eighty gram paper is hopeless for this and there is no trick that rescues it.

PNG files, and when you actually want them

Printing is the usual ending, but the page will also hand you image files. Two buttons do slightly different things.

Download cards as PNG gives you a ZIP with one image per guest. Each one is the flat, unfolded artwork, numbered in printing order and named after the guest, so the files sort correctly in a folder. This is the one to send to a print shop, or to drop into a design program if someone wants to add a photograph behind the name.

Download sheets as PNG gives you the laid-out pages instead, marks and all. That is useful when you want to email the finished sheets to whoever has the good printer, without asking them to open this page and get the settings right themselves.

The image quality setting controls the detail. A hundred and fifty dots per inch is fine for anything that will only be looked at on a screen. Three hundred is the printing standard and the sensible default. Six hundred is there for very fine borders and small type, and it produces files four times the size of three hundred.

Be patient with a long list. Every card is drawn and then encoded as a PNG, one at a time, and a browser encodes an image at three hundred dots per inch in about a second. Eighty guests is a minute or so, with a progress bar to watch. If you only want paper at the end, printing straight from the page is much quicker.

A worked example: eighty guests at ten tables

Here is the whole job end to end. Eighty guests, ten round tables of eight, a September wedding, and a couple called Amelia and Ravi.

Start in the spreadsheet you already keep the seating plan in. Put the guest's name in the first column and the table number in the second. Save it as CSV and drop it onto the page. Eighty rows appear in the summary, with eight against each table.

Set the card size to ninety by fifty-five and leave the style on folded tent. Type Amelia & Ravi in the small line above the name, and set the date. Choose a serif face, a double rule border, and an accent colour that matches the flowers. Leave Set every name at the same size on.

Now choose By table, then by surname. Glance at the summary and check the count against each table is eight. Switch Print in this order to it and the preview reorders.

The header says eighty cards, four per sheet, twenty sheets. Buy twenty-five sheets of two hundred and fifty gram card, because you want spares. Print one test sheet on plain paper at a hundred per cent, measure it, then run the real thing.

Score and fold each card, and cut the stack on the guillotine. Then print two or three extra sheets with the whole list again, so that when the seating changes on the morning of the wedding, and it will, there is already a card for the person who moved.

The mistakes that cost a reprint

Spelling is first, by a long way. A guest whose name is misspelt on a place card notices, and so does everybody at their table. Read the summary table on screen before printing, not the tiny names on the preview sheets. It is a plain list of what will be printed and it is much easier to check.

Second is printing too early. Seating plans change up to the last day. Cards printed three weeks out will need patching. Print the week of the event, keep spare card, and keep the list saved so a reprint is a two minute job.

Third is renumbering tables after printing. If the venue turns the top table into table one and shifts everything else along, every card is wrong. Agree the numbers with the venue before you print, or leave the table off the cards entirely and rely on a seating plan by the door.

Fourth is forgetting that the card has two sides. If you set the back to blank to save ink, the person opposite gets nothing to read, which is half the point of a folded card. Blank backs make sense for table tents standing against a wall, and rarely anywhere else.

Fifth is stacking cards before the ink is dry. Inkjet ink on card takes a few minutes. Cards stacked straight out of the printer will offset onto each other, and the mark is on the face of the card where it shows.

Nothing about your guests leaves this browser

A guest list is a list of other people's names, and often their seating, their meal choices and who is sitting with whom. It is exactly the sort of list that should not be uploaded to a website in exchange for a free template.

Nothing here is uploaded. The list is read, sorted, drawn, printed and turned into image files by code running in your own browser. There is no account, no server doing the work, and no copy of your list anywhere else. You can confirm it: load the page, disconnect from the internet, and everything still works.

The list and every setting are saved to this browser's own local storage as you type, so closing the tab or refreshing the page does not lose an afternoon's work. That copy stays on this computer. It does not follow you to your phone, and anyone else using the same browser profile could see it, which is worth knowing on a shared machine.

Start over wipes that saved copy and puts the example list back. Save the list as CSV downloads a copy of the parsed list in printing order, which is genuinely useful as a record of what you printed, and is the only copy that ever leaves the page.