You may find the free program SCRIBUS very helpful in doing your layout.

An 8.5" x 11" vertical sheet can be laid out for ten business cards, each 2" x 3.5". Left-Right margins are 0.75", top-Bottom margins are 0.5". You can then get two vertical columns of 5 cards each.

Put the front image of your cards in the left-hand column and the reverse of your cards in the right-hand column. When you turn the page over to print they should print properly aligned front-to-back (depending on the accuracy of your printer, of course).

So, do the front and back images of your cards as two separate GIMP files and use SCRIBUS for laying them out on your sheet. If you use guide lines you can ensure that things are aligned vertically when front and back are side-by-side.

When you want to output for print, output to PDF and then print the PDF.

Cheers, Rick S.

-----Original Message----- From: Wrenchman
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2017 10:06 AM To: gimp-user-list@gnome.org
Cc: notifications@gimpusers.com
Subject: [Gimp-user] print business card

Hi there, I'm new to Gimp and to this forum, I've been doing Gimp for about a
month now and although I didn't understand it in the beginning it's really quite
user friendly, BTW. I use 2.8

anyway I ran into a problem making mine own homemade business-cards, and that is
that the front and the back do not perfectly overlap when printed.

I'm trying to push everything a little bit by chance and then hoping for the best, using a lot of draft paper, but it's still off by about 2 mm on the print.

I see one solution would be to make a larger bleeding area, as of now I have zero bleeding area, but I would rather like to understand how to make a perfect
overlap.

more specifically: Horizontally the overlap seems perfect; Vertically it's off
by 2 mm

also I discovered that when you print the front and then turn the paper around
and put it back in the printer everything turns opposite so that what was printed on the left side of the paper is now printed on the right side.

Thanks,

:)

Wrenchman

Wrenchman (via www.gimpusers.com/forums)

Wrenchman writes:

anyway I ran into a problem making mine own homemade business-cards, and that is that the front and the back do not perfectly overlap when printed.

I'm trying to push everything a little bit by chance and then hoping for the best, using a lot of draft paper, but it's still off by about 2 mm on the print.

I see one solution would be to make a larger bleeding area, as of now I have zero bleeding area, but I would rather like to understand how to make a perfect overlap.

Unfortunately that's usually a function of the printer. Even the professional business card printers usually require a fairly large bleed area, and once I saw that I felt less annoyed with my home printer for being inconsistent.

more specifically: Horizontally the overlap seems perfect; Vertically it's off by 2 mm

also I discovered that when you print the front and then turn the paper around and put it back in the printer everything turns opposite so that what was printed on the left side of the paper is now printed on the right side.

The easiest way to solve this is to have a template file. For instance, you can put guides, both horizontal and vertical, where you expect the card images to be. Draw lines along the guides and print to check the alignment; repeat until they're where you want them, then turn off the layer with the lines, leaving only the guides, and save as businesscard-template.xcf. Then start with that when you're designing a new set of cards.

I used to do that, but I found that my printer was so inconsistent about how it fed the paper that it lined up very differently each time. I decided it was easier just to make an image and send it to a printing service, with dimensions and bleed area as specified by the service; each company seems to use different values, so I need to make a template that's specific to a particular printing company.

...Akkana