What I'm trying to do:

I'm attempting to design a prototype print-and-play card game.

The cards are double sided, and have unique graphics per card on each side.

Eventual goal is to only maybe get them professionally printed, but usually have them printed by the players after downloading a PDF from the internet.

I want to be able to print edge to edge on each card, which restricts me to having a bleed as well as respecting the size and common margins of both A4 and letter (for internationalization).

What is the best way that I can easily composite multiple of these InDesign documents, to prepare them for home printing?

Currently I have:

A document preset to 3.5" x 2.5" with an 1/8th inch bleed configured as a prototype card. 2 pages, no spread. page 1 is the front of the card, page 2 the back of the card.

Large sections of this document will be replaced by a data merge.

After the data merge has happened, I'm expecting that I will have to use a single record per page, in order to facilitate the double sided printing, Or is there a way of using multiple records per page, and maintaining double sided printing?

How can I then flip the pages correctly, or should I attempt to leave that to the printer drivers?

As it's still in the prototyping stage, I would prefer to only print 1 copy of the deck at a time.

(this is the first time I've used In Design)

  • 1
    As this is not a direct answer to your question I'll keep it a comment. Indesigns Data merge cannot handle multiple records per page with mirrored back sides. However - there's software for InDesign that extends data merge functionality a lot like MyDataMerge on Mac. For your issue check out this video (it's with business cards but think of it as game cards) youtu.be/4d1gSsDWTNw – Pat_Morita Mar 21 at 23:48

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