ORPHALESE TAROT TUTORIAL

Making personalized decks for Orphalese Tarot is really easy if you have a minimal experience with almost any graphical editor. All you need is a graphic for each card (BMP, JPG, GIF or PNG are accepted), name them with a certain convention, add a card back and a info file (if you wish), and put the result inside a folder in Orphalese's PACKS directory. Next time you open the program, your new deck is selectable from "My Decks" list. Please keep in mind that Orphalese shareware version only allows three simultaneous decks on the list: if you have more than three decks installed, only the first three are available, rest will show its name grayed. Of course, you can delete a previous deck to install a new one, but the low register fee for the program (only 9,99 dollars) is affordable and will allow you to work with as many decks as you want. Since Version 4.9, decks can be arranged in subfolders, making easier to arrange and sort all your decks if you have plenty of them (my case!).

Before starting with the graphic chores, spend some time thinking about the concept of your Tarot. Orphalese Tarot is so versatile that allows to virtually represent almost anything based on cards, carboards or tokens if you're skilled enough for design it. The main purpose are the Tarot cards, but you can also design or scan regular (or special) decks, trading card collections, runes, I Ching coins... just imagine it. Tarot or card decks can be related to any subject you want. If your subject can offer plenty of human figures (Court and Trump cards show mainly human or antropomorphic beings), or suggest abstract concepts thru a visual metaphor, we're in the right path. But it's your Tarot (or your deck), so go ahead and let your imagination flow.

Obviously, scanning an existing deck is the quickest way to make Orphalese-compatible any kind of cards. Just put the cards on your flatbed scanner, taking care about saving all the resulting images with same size and resolution. You don't need really big images, since all cards should fit into the screen. The program can resize cards as needed, bigger or smaller, but the greater in size are your cards, the most space in disk will take. Also, Orphalese will make slower the card's play, since it has to downsize all cards present in screen. There's no standard measures for cards in Orphalese, it all depends of your desktop resolution. Let's asume, for a standard 1024x768 setting, that any card size below 200 x 300 pixels it's OK. You've scanned your decks? Right, then jump ahead to Preparation of the Deck section. If you've decided to do more creative, then go on.

Photoshop is my application of choice for designing decks, but any other you're familiarized with can work. What's a card, really? A carboard rectangle with certain pictures and symbols printed on it. The typical numbers for a given deck are:

Complete Tarot (Major and Minor Arcana): 78 cards
Minor Arcana Only Tarot: 22 cards
French Card Deck: 52 cards (54 if two Jokers are added)
Spanish Card Deck: 48 cards (50 if two Jokers are added)
Jeu du Tarot (French Card Game): 78 cards

A special project can contain any number of cards (64 for I Ching, 24 for runes, etc), so it's up to you to decide. I have decks ranging from 15 to 118 cards, so this is a pretty personal decision linked with the idea you have. The best way to make all cards identical is using a template: you can see examples on the Tarot Files section.

There's two different approaches for template use: the "big" template and the card-by-card template. A "big" template it's just a huge graphic containing all the cards: once all cards are illustrated, you must crop one by one for preparing the deck. This method has advantages and disavantages: you can easily keep track of all cards and work in a confortable way, since all the deck can be seen at a glance. On the negative part, there's the cropping involved and the dificulties inherent to a big graphic file, hard to manage if your computer or your software is not powerful enough. The card-by-card negates this problem and there's no need for cropping, but ask more discipline (and sometimes, lots of tiny files open in your window) for not forgetting any card in the process.

What comes now is the sheer creative part, personally the one I enjoy the most. There's no rules or indications in this part, just the ones dictated by your skills or your imagination. You should take decisions like the names for the Trump cards, making them adequate for your project, which suits will the deck have, the overall design for the card... Since Version 4, Orphalese Tarot supports transparent regions, and this means that your card are not limited to square or rectangular shapes: if you use a given color as "colour 0", in the same way you can do with transparent-background GIF images, Orphalese renders it invisible, achieving the desired effect. The only limitation to this is that the graphic used for back of cards and represents the main deck is not rendered with transparency. There's certain things you must keep into account dealing with non-rectangular decks, like cards flipped when coming out of the pack, or the back design of cards, than must be designed very carefully to fit the chosen shape. But part of the challenge lies here.

Once you're done with the creative part, and your cards are ready, you must assemble your pack of cards. Name your first card 00, 01 the next one, and so on. On a typical Tarot deck, the order and filenames are the following:

00 to 21 - Major Arcana or Trump Cards (00 is the Fool, 21 is the World). Note that, using 00 for the Fool, rest of the Major arcana have the same ordinal numbers they show in the card.

22 to 35 - Suit of Wands
36 to 49 - Suit of Cups
50 to 63 - Suit of Swords
64 to 77 - Suit of Coins

Suits are formed by ordinal cards from 1 to 10, plus four court cards (Jack, Knight, Queen and King). Wands equal to Clubs, Cups equal to Hearts, Swords to Spades and Coins to Diamonds in French decks. After renaming the cards, you must provide a graphic for the back of the cards: make another graphic with same size than your cards, put the design you want on it, call it simply BACK, and put it inside the deck folder. Orphalese will remember this is the card back for your deck.

The XML info file is a tiny text file that states the data for the pack (number of cards, author, publisher, copyright, transparent support, etc). It is always called PACKINFO.XML, and its located inside the pack folder like rest of the graphics. It stores the info that appears when you choose "About" in Orphalese's menu. After all, it's just a little piece of HTML code with the following structure:

You don't need to add this file if you don't want: Orphalese will ask for the number of cards contained in the deck the first time you use it, and will remember the number. If you think creating the XML is too complicated, just use for this purpose the XML editor included in Orphalese since version 4.9. It makes this part really easy. Congratulations, you've designed your first Orphalese deck... I'm sure you will improve with every new deck you make.