Inkcards is an Inkscape extension to create a decks of cards from a single SVG. You'll need anothe SVG to tile them for printing. The required SVG size is the same as A single card size from the deck. By activating some layers and inactivating others, the card shows (in Inkscape). Thus a web game could use a single SVG as it's card deck. The cards layers are described as inkcards:card tags. If you want to print the cards, once all cards are drawn, use the inkcards_tile extension to tile the cards on a page size document. It tile the cards per page (layers) and let you see the original layers, thought you should not change them, as they are moved in the defs section of the SVG. There's currently 2 way to tile cards, basic and book single page, for inspiration on how to create physical cards using the book single page see this video.
To install Inkcards, the files src/* should be copied into the Inkscape extension dir (on Ubuntu: ~/.config/inkscape/extensions). The extension should then (upon restart) be available in the menu extensions/🃟 inkcards...
Suppose you are creating a smiley based game, where you have some cards representing different smiley. We can create a base layer to give the card background on top of which we have a Yellow face layer containing a single yellow circle. Then we can draw face element with the Eyes and Mouth sub layers. We can then create the smiley cards by choosing the layers to use.
Now using the extension to register the cards by saving the active layers for each specific card and associate a card as the rear, we have a complete deck of cards.
Using the inkcards_tile extension, from a second, printable sized, SVG, we
are copying each layers in the <def> section and <use> them for each
card making use of it.
To prevent from unperfect cuts, you could create a background rectangle the size of a card and make it's stroke the same color, so that the card bakground is slighly larger than the card cut locations. Ensure the card extra does not overlap with the minimal card spacing size.
It could be used to tile any type of cards, let say Decktet Magnate's tokens. It could also be used to tile instructions you have to follow (origami).
We could learn with countersheet to edit the text in a card and have a configuration option to have the text modified. So we could set the text for a card in the config file.
The step to create a tiled document could be removed, exporting it to PDF directly. ... Create the tiled document according to a given page dimension, save a copy of each page to PDF and use pdfunite them to create a single PDF.
I got my base inspiration by ready this thread. on BoardGameGeek, hence the svg namespace (http://boardgamegeek.com/inkscape/extension/inkcards)