heathd / card_printer

For making nicely formatted PDFs of story cards

CardPrinter

A general purpose library for generating PDFs which can be printed on 6x4 index cards.

Installation

The recommended way is to just install the gem, this will also add a card_printer command:

$ gem install card_printer

If you use rbenv to manage ruby versions, remember to:

$ rbenv rehash

after installing the gem.

Usage

You can use the card printer as a stand-alone binary.

$ card_printer

Invoked with no arguments you'll see usage instructions.

Usage: card_printer [options] <output file.pdf>
Options:
    -p=, parser    Choose input parser (one of 'csv', 'json_lines', 'trello_json_export', default: trello_json_export)
    -r=, renderer  Choose layout renderer (one of '6x4', 'a6', 'a5', default: '6x4')
    -h=            display this help message

Typical usage would be:

1. export data from your trello board (instructions) which saves a file such as aI48isTv.json

2. Run it using the shell < operator to provide the input data:

   $ card_printer output.pdf < aI48isTv.json
   

3. Done! Open output.pdf

Input formats

The card_printer accepts three types of data format as input:

• csv - should have headers matching the expected field names
• json_lines - JSON Lines format with one card per line
• trello_json_export (default) - direct export of the whole board in json format

for the csv and json_lines formats the stories can have the following fields:

• name (required) - main story title
• story_type - determines the colour of the border {feature|bug|chore|retro|other}
• estimate - number shown in bottom left corner
• label - shown in bottom right of card (use for tags or epic names)
• id - shown in bottom centre of card

for the trello_json_export format the data will be used in the following way:

• name - taken from the card title
• story type - taken from name of the trello label (using substring match for 'feature/bug/chore' defaults to 'other')
• estimate - not extracted at present
• label - not extracted at present
• id - extracts the short ID of the trello card.

About trello short IDs

This is a new feature in Trello, and doesn't appear to work fully as described. I couldn't find a way to link to or directly open a trello card using its short ID, although searching using the short id within your board does seem to find the card (but also other apparently unrelated things).

You can also use this bookmarklet to reveal the card short ids on your board:

javascript:(function(){$(".card-short-id").removeClass("hide")})())

To add it to your browser:

1. copy the above javascript code (including javascript:)
2. right click on your browser bookmarks toolbar
3. select 'add page' or 'add bookmark'
4. enter a name such as 'Show card IDs'
5. in the URL field paste the javascript code

Alternatives

• Peter Kappus's Trello Printer - nifty printout of a whole board (not separate cards)
• Board Printer for Trello Chrome Plugin - makes quite nice small cards with title and image, printing onto regular paper. Could be good for card sorting exercise

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request