Smart Card Booklet Maker
Turn your ID cards into a print-ready booklet at home. No watermark, no signup, nothing leaves your device. Add up to seven cards, front and back, plus a two-part cover, and the tool works out the whole layout on a single A4 sheet printed on both sides — pages ordered for the fold, and the reverse already mirrored for the way your printer turns the paper. Print it, cut it into strips, stack them, staple through the middle and fold: a stapled pocket booklet where every spread shows one card's front and back side by side, printed at the exact size of the real card or scaled up to fill the sheet.
1 Cover leaf
The first strip of the booklet. Both cards are drawn from what you type — nothing here is uploaded.
2 Your cards
Each card takes two faces, its front and its back, and the pair is printed side by side on one strip.
3 Printing
4 Preview and download
Side 1 — front
Side 2 — reverse, already mirrored
Position the card
Drag to move, pinch or scroll to zoom. The box is locked to card shape, 85.6 × 54 mm, so the crop is always the right proportion.
From sheet to booklet
The whole thing is one sheet of paper. Four steps turn it into something you can carry: print it on both sides, cut it into strips, stack them in the order printed down the edge, and staple through the middle before folding the pile in half.
1. Print both sides
One A4 sheet, duplex, at 100%. The pages are already ordered for the fold, and side 2 mirrored for the way your printer turns it.
2. Cut into strips
Three straight cuts along the dashed lines. Each strip becomes four booklet pages once it is creased down the middle.
3. Stack 1 → 4
Strip 1 goes down first and the rest pile on top. The numbers are printed on side 1 only, so a strip cannot go in upside down.
4. Staple the middle, fold
Two staples through the centre line, then fold the pile in half. The crease is the spine, so it opens like a book: one card's front and back facing each other on every spread.
How to use it
Fill in the cover
Type the holder's name and contact, and who the booklet was made by. Those two cards are drawn for you and take the front of the first strip, so anyone who finds the booklet knows whose it is.
Add your cards
Photograph or scan both sides of each card, then tap its front and back and crop them. The crop box is locked to CR80 — the size every Aadhaar, PAN, licence and bank card is — so each one comes out at the size of the real thing. A card's two faces are printed side by side on the same strip, so you see both at once without turning the leaf, and any face you leave empty prints as blank space.
Tell it how your printer flips
Almost every printer turns the paper on its long edge, which is the default here. The setting exists because the ones that don't would put every card's back on the wrong page, and you would not find out until the booklet was stapled.
Print, cut, stack, staple, fold
Print double-sided at 100% — not "fit to page". Cut along the dashed lines into strips. Lay strip 1 down first and pile the rest on in order, staple twice through the centre line, and fold the whole stack in half. That is the booklet.
Why the pages look out of order
The preview will not read like a booklet, and it should not. Stapling through the middle and folding means the strips nest inside one another, so the pages have to be printed in the order the fold puts them back into. Printers call it saddle stitching, and it is what every stapled magazine in the world is built from. The outermost strip carries the first page and the last one together; the strip inside it carries the second and second-to-last, and so on inwards.
One consequence surprises people: most spreads are made of two different strips. The card front on the left comes off one strip and its back on the right off its neighbour in the pile — working inwards for the first half of the booklet and back outwards for the second. Only the middle spread, the innermost strip opened flat, comes off a single piece of paper. That is why the stacking order matters, and why the numbers are printed down the edge.
On top of that, side 2 is mirrored. A printer doing a double-sided job pulls the sheet back in flipped, so whatever it lays on the second side lands reversed against the first. The layout mirrors it in advance and the two cancel: on a long-edge flip the columns swap, on a short-edge flip the rows swap and every page is turned upside down to compensate. Get that setting wrong and the halves of every card end up on different spreads.
What this tool does not do
It does not read, verify or store your documents. The card images stay in the page as canvases, are drawn straight into the PDF, and are gone when you close the tab — there is no account, no history and no server copy, because the file is never sent anywhere to begin with. If you want to check that, open the tool, turn your wifi off, and make the booklet anyway.
A printed copy of your ID cards is still a printed copy of your ID cards. It is genuinely useful in a wallet or a glovebox, and it is exactly as sensitive as the originals — losing the booklet is losing all of them at once. Treat it that way, and think twice before making one for somebody else's documents.
Frequently asked questions
What paper should I use?
Ordinary 100–120 gsm paper is enough for a pocket booklet, and thicker card stock up to about 200 gsm works if your printer takes it. Glossy photo paper is a poor choice here: it is hard to cut cleanly, hard to staple and hard to write on. Whatever you use, print at 100% — 'fit to page' shrinks the sheet and the cards stop being card size.
Do the strips stack or nest inside each other?
They nest, which happens by itself: stack them flat in the printed order with strip 1 at the bottom, staple through the middle and fold, and the pile turns into nested folded sheets. Strip 1 wraps the outside and carries the cover, which is why it is numbered first.
How do I print this double-sided?
Send the PDF to your printer and turn on double-sided, duplex or 'print on both sides'. If your printer cannot do it by itself, print page 1, put the sheet back in the tray, and print page 2 on the other side. Both pages are one physical sheet: the tool never expects more than one piece of paper.
Which flip setting should I choose?
Long edge, unless you know otherwise — it is the default on nearly every printer and driver. If the first attempt comes out with the backs of the cards on the wrong fronts, that is the symptom of the other setting: switch to short edge and print again. Nothing else needs changing.
Are my documents uploaded anywhere?
No. Every card is read by your browser, cropped on a canvas in the page and written into the PDF on your own device. There is no upload in the tool at all, and it keeps working with the internet disconnected once the page has loaded.
How many cards fit?
Seven double-sided cards — fourteen pages — plus the two cover pages, on one sheet printed both sides. You can also pick three or five cards if you have fewer, which uses fewer strips and less paper. The layout is worked out from the number you choose rather than fixed.
What if a card is blank on the back?
Leave that face empty and it prints as blank space you can write on. There is no separate setting for single-sided cards: a card always reserves its two faces, so the numbering stays predictable and the front of card five is always the front of card five. If you are mostly carrying single-sided cards you will get fewer of them on a sheet, which is the trade for a layout that never shuffles under you.
Why is it cut into strips instead of separate cards?
Each strip is a folded sheet of the booklet, carrying four pages once it is creased down the middle. Cutting into individual cards would give you a loose pile, which is what you probably already have. Three straight cuts is also far quicker than sixteen.
Can I print the cards bigger?
Yes — switch Card size to 'Fill the sheet'. Two cards across A4 is 171 mm of a 210 mm page and four down is 216 mm of 297 mm, so at life size the sheet is only about 59% covered and the rest is margin. Filling it prints each card roughly a tenth larger, which uses the paper better and reads more easily in a booklet, at the cost of the printed card no longer matching the real one. Actual size is the default because that is the version you can lay on top of the original and check.
Is this the same as saddle stitching?
Yes. Saddle stitch is the printing term for a booklet made by stapling through the fold of nested sheets, which is exactly what this is — every stapled magazine and thin paperback is bound the same way. The only unusual part here is that the sheets are strips cut from one A4 page rather than full sheets.
Where exactly do the staples go?
Through the dash-dot line down the middle of the sheet, twice, once the strips are stacked. That line is the spine: it is not a cut line, and nothing is trimmed off it. A normal stapler reaches it if you open it flat, or a long-arm stapler makes it easy.
Which way does it open?
Like a book, hinged on the left. The closed cover is the holder's card, the first spread shows the front and back of card one facing each other, the next spread card two, and so on. The 'issued by' card is the back cover.