Template Editor

The template editor is opened from the home screen by pressing the edit button below Template in the right panel. The template editor has three sections:

  • Layers: This is where layers are created, selected and managed at a high level.
  • Layer config: This is where you enter settings for a layer you have selected.
  • Preview: This shows a preview of cards/components.

Layers

By pressing the add button in the layers section, you can add a new layer. There are three types of layers – text, image and shape. When adding a new layer, a box appears where you select which type of layer should be added. Some things to note:

  • Layer order matters. Layers further down in the list are placed on top of layers further up. New layers are added at the bottom. You can reorder layers by clicking and draggning.
  • Layers can be cloned. This could for example be useful if you have three close-to-identical layers for placing three icons. Cloning is done with the appropriate button, shown when you have selected a layer.
  • Layer visibility can be turned on and off by the button for this, shown on the selected layer. Above the layer list is a checkbox allowing highlighting the selected layer, which may be useful if you have layers that may easily be mixed up.
  • Deleting layers is done with the button for this, shown when you have selected a layer. You will have to confirm to actually delete the layer. There is no undelete.

Layer config

The layer config panel, in the middle of the template editor, shows settings for the selected layer. Which settings are available depends on the type of layer selected, but some settings are present for all layer types.

Common settings for layers

  • Layer name is the name as presented on screen. Short and descriptive is generally a good idea.
  • Dimensions tells where the content of the layer should be placed. There is offset from top left corner (X and Y properties) as well as width and height (W and H properties). The dimensions can be set either in percent of the component size, in millimeters, or in pixels. Switching from XYWH to INSET coordinate mode instead allows setting the dimensions as distance from the four sides of the component, which is useful in some cases.

Config for text layers

  • Font allows selecting font, style (such as bold or italic), text size and also text color. Formatting is not collected from the spreadsheet, so any formatting in the spreadsheet will be lost. Note that text size will be decreased if necessary to fit the text within the given dimensions.
  • Text alignment allows setting setting left/center/right in horizontal alignment, and top/middle/bottom in vertical alignment.
  • Text content tells what the actual text should be. You can enter static text, but you probably also want some text fetched from the spreadsheet. You insert column values by entering column header in tripple curly-braces, for example {{{Name}}}. By default any column matching the layer name will be used.

PDF fonts

The first fonts in the list that are uncapitalized (helvetica etc) are the built-in PDF fonts, and there are 2 things to note about them:

  • they don't need to be embedded into the file, so if you are targeting a small file size for your prints, you may which to use these
  • they aren't modern unicode fonts, so they lack what are considered "special characters" to average English speakers/writers, but are commonplace in other languages and at higher levels of reading

So, if you're having issues with some of your characters not appearing correctly, try a Google Font instead!

Google Fonts

The remaining, capitalized fonts (ABeeZee etc) are in fact provided by Google Fonts. These fonts:

  • are downloaded and embedded into the PDF, resulting in a larger file size (slightly larger, usually a single high quality image will be larger than a font)
  • typically contain the full unicode character set, helpful for games that
  • have a wide range of stylistic options (900+ fonts available and counting)

Try out different Google Fonts to achieve a unique style, or to render the full range of unicode characters.

Config for image layers

  • Image selection: This section holds a few important settings.
    • First of them is the link for uploading images. As the dialogue will tell you, images must be uploaded through this tool to be accessible for Paperize – it is not enough to upload them to the relevant folder in Google Drive.
    • The static and dynamic selection style tells whether a given image should be used for all components (static) or the image should vary depending on content in the spreadsheet (dynamic). If using the dynamic setting, you get extra options for describing the image name. Only the middle of these settings allow fetching data from a spreadsheet column – the prefix and suffix boxes just hold static text.
  • Image alignment tells whether the image should be scaled to fit inside the given dimensions (fit), scaled to fill the given dimensions completely (fill) or stretched to match the dimensions even if it changes image proportions (stretch). There are also options for telling if left/center/right part of the image should show in case the full width isn't visible, and similarly for top/middle/bottom.

Config for shape layers

  • Shape tells which shape should be drawn. There available types are rectangle, rounded rectangle and ellipse. There are no settings for the radius for the rounded rectangle.
  • Stroke contains settings for the border of the shape: width and color. The border can also be turned off.
  • Fill contains settings for any color to fill the shape with. It is unfilled by default.

Magic properties

A number of properties have a spreadsheet icon next to them. This tells that magic properties can be used to set the values from spreadsheet data, instead of entering them manually in the editor. This is done by setting a column name to the name of the magic property, visible when inspecting the spreadsheet icon. Magic properties support certain values, depending on where they are used.

Check out the Magic Properties documentation to learn more about them.

Preview

The preview pane can be used to preview how updates to the layers look on actual components. This is a standard Google preview of a pdf generated on the fly, which means that some settings might not be not fully relevant for the context. The download button downloads a single component in pdf format.