Help printing one membership card at a time

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My client needs to print membership cards on demand, with the following requirements:
a. print one card at a time on standard-sized membership cards, as needed (not a high-frequency demand)
b. avoid full-sized card sheets because after printing one card, the rest of the sheet eventually becomes useless.
c. inexpensive. I’ve looked at several “card printers”, but they are priced around $1K and apparently made for larger-scale production work.

A single card (about 2×3.5″) is normally too small to push through an ink jet or laser printer, at least on its own.

Does anybody have a solution on how I can print just one membership card at a time? Any kind of attachment or device that will let me print one card in a regular laser printer?

BTW, the software application is MS Access, but I think that is irrelevant. This is more of a printer issue than software issue. Thanks for any ideas!

George

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Consider the cost of labour relative to the cost of a single sheet of card.

Surely the business itself has a need for business cards, possibly personalized for individual employees, and you can always include small batches of those on the same sheet.

The business may also have a need for non-personalized advertising cards, or redemption cards for special promotions or discounts, that can be printed on the same sheet.

You may also allow have at least occasional demand for printing more than one membership card at a time, and even more than one sheet of cards at a time.

Finally, you can chop most of the unused portion of a card into a standard size of stock cards, such as 4 X 7 (US/Can), and even print standard guide lines on them.

You will still have to prepare the layouts to cover all possibilities, but not much need go to waste.

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Dogberry,
Thanks for the reply! Much of what you say makes sense, esp. labor vs paper costs. And it is not like they have to print 100’s of cards all the time. It’s a regular, but somewhat low-quantity type of need. However valid your comments are for a regular business, my client is a member of a school district, so some of those benefits are not applicable. Yes, they will need to print more than one card at a time, of course, and have. But that does not invalidate the need to print one card at a time, which is the more common situation. Now, on a typical 8.5×11 sheet we could cut the sheets in half and feed each through, getting at least two cards. I wish there was a printer add-on, like a envelope feeder, for business cards.

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George,
There are all kinds of vairables here, what about using Avery’s addon for MS Word? That would allow you to use sheets and pick the spot on the sheet you want to print, that way the sheets aren’t wasted. you could set up a word template for them to use the the Avery wizzard.

Rick

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Bresinri,
Thank you for the response! Your solution for controlling the location on a sheet is certainly a good one. However, the issue is not “where” on the sheet to print one card. The problem is how to use the sheet to its fullest capacity without waste. That is, over time you might be able to run a card sheet through a printer up to 4 times, printing one card each time. Then what? Ultimately, the sheet becomes too small to push through the printer. It just seems odd that there seems to be no handy solution to printing a single card-sized sheet that does not require purchasing a $1000+ printer! So I’m just wondering if I’m overlooking something.

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Doesn’t Avery, or someone have peel off type cards that could then be applied to a heavier card stock, or laminated? With a peel off type paper, the basic baper remains full size and only the peel off portion is used. I would probably check at an office supply store (Staples, Office Max, etc.) to see what they have.

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George,

To expand on Ted’s idea. How about using a cheap label printer and then just attaching the printed lable to your card stock? I’m sure you can find a label printer that will output the size label you need. :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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1. This is an application where the old dot matrix printer worked well. You could buy a package of cards with perf edges, load it into the printer, print one card, and you were done.

2. Is it necessary to custom print each card when the only data which will change is the member’s name, number, and a date? You could print a sheet of cards and fill this information by hand for the small jobs. If you needed to print a quantity of cards, you could use Mail Merge.

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I do apologise if I am missing something here, but wouldn’t using custom paper size on the printer options be the solution? Cut the card stock into strips the correct width and just set the custom size paper for that width, using “print to edge” or equivalent if available? If not, then you would have to cut the card stock a little wider and just have to cut each individual card out.

I do not know if they still do it, but Waddington’s (yes, the people who make the board games…) used to do membership cards on card carriers, so you just peeled off a single card and ran the rest through again to print another one. They also did self-laminating cards.

Have you looked through the sites that come up when you do a search for “membership cards on card carriers”? Maybe something there would be suitable?

There is always the “fudge” of course… Print just the details on to a sticky label using something like Avery’s templates and simply stick the label on to a pre-printed card possibly?

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1. This is an application where the old dot matrix printer worked well.

And still does!

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If the membership cards are the same size as business cards, you can buy sheets from various makers of separable cards on various stocks. That doesn’t solve your problem, but it saves you from having to do any cutting (although a little extra scoring sometimes makes a cleaner edge).

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If printing to sheets of Mailing Labels from Access you can (with a bit of code) start the printing from any label on the sheet. So one option is to print to a Mailing label, attach to a piece of card and laminate. (Sheets of mailing labels don’t get any smaller as you peel off the used ones.)

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For our club, I set up 8.5″x11″ card stock and made the form 3.66″ high (3 to a page.) I also lined up the club logo and member name and address to show through a double window envelope. I added dotted lines around the membership card to assist the receipant to cut out their own card. There was other information included to occupy the rest of the white space.

Doing it that way, if I only printed one, there were still 2 available on the remaining stock. But if there was one form left, it didn’t go through on it’s own. I suppose it could have been lined up to print like an envelope.

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I had a similar problem with printing checks. I had purchased blank check stock with 3 checks to a page. I ran each page through the printer once to make the blank check and then again to print the information. No problem with first pass. Second pass worked OK if page was still full or only one check had been used. But if two checks had been used I had to fill out the third check by hand.

Now I use voucher checks which are one to a page. I don’t print many checks so they last a long time.

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Thanks to all of your for your considered replies and suggestions! My client rejects the peel-off label because they want the information printed directly on the card stock (which looks more professional, anyway). As some of you noted, printing each card on a sheet that is recycled as each prior card is removed leads to the very problem we are having with not wasting paper (or not wasting too much). T.K.’s suggestion of some kind of “carrier” is what I’ve also been searching for, as well; something like an envelope feeder, perhaps. I located some on Amazon, such as the “PVC ID Card Tray for the Epson R280 R290” for about $20. Of course, it is for those plastic cards, which may be okay for my purpose. But it’s a good start. I have not given up on being clever about using card sheets, however: Print the top two, one at a time, turn the sheet upside down and print the bottom two, one at a time, for example.
Well, I have some options to present to the client and we can start experimenting. Thanks again to all of your for your time and thoughts. Have a great day! – george

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MS Word prints labels from Mail Merge. You can print one label anywhere on the sheet of label material. The database can be in Word, or Excel, or Access.

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You should not have to waste too much card stock?

What I was thinking of when I suggested re-using the cut cards was this… If it’s of any use?

Cut the card stock in half for example, and as an example, lets’ say this “sheet” is 10″ x 4″ and will fit 5 cards on it.

You set the printer for “custom paper size” – Actually the size of your cut sheet of 10″ x 4″

Someone wants a card, print one off and cut it off…

Someone else wants a card – Still set the printer for 10″ x 4″, but feed in the sheet that has already had a card cut off. As long as you don’t have “Fit to width” or “Print centered”, or something like that checked. Just have instead something like “Print to actual size from DPI” checked, then the printer will not know the card is still 4″ wide, but not the full 10″ long anymore, it will not even care, it will just line it up at the start and print one card on the end of the sheet.

When the sheet gets too small to reliabily feed through your printers’ mechanism, perhaps say just long enough for two more cards, you will have to keep it with the rest of the sheets until two or more cards are wanted at the same time and you can use it up then.

This system does work, I’ve used something very similar myself, where I had to print onto top-quality photo card stock, that is ruiniously expensive… I’ve also used it for printing on T-Shirt transfer paper and blank magnetic sheets, for making “fridge magnets”. The system works very well, and is the cheapest method by far, but it is also tiresome to work with. You get fed up of offcuts, too valuable to waste…

Card carriers are really like sheets of paper, with cards stuck on them with temporary glue – Think storecards for example. They come stuck to a letter. The letter is not just for information, it is actually the “card carrier” for getting the blank card reliably through the printer, so it can be filled in.

That’s custom stationary however, it’s very expensive and usually has a minimum order quantity of 10,000 sheets or so. I doubt that is going to be be practical for you? However if you do the search for the words I suggested, I found several adverts that do blank cards on blank sheets quite “reasonably” priced. The blank card carriers can be printed out at the same time as the card itself – Think of printing a letter, with a picture in it. You just set it so the picture is actually the card you want to print and it needs only one run through the printer then to print the card AND the “Welcome to…” letter at the same time.

I think they also do blank sheets covered with blank cards (not just one blank card on a sheet), so you would print one out, peel it off, and put the rest of the sheet away to print out another one when it is needed. This would probably mean one blank sheet of paper is wasted every 8 or so cards, but if they are really anal about it, just make sure all the temporary glue is rubbed off and use the sheet in the printer to print a letter or something as it is normal-sized paper!

Actually, for anyone serious about saving money or ecology, perhaps they might want to look into Kyocera’s Eco-Sys laser printers, which are potentially the cheapest to run and the most enviromentally-friendly laser printers?

Hope some of this might help them?!

Good luck!

T.K

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hwgaer,
You are correct. In fact, the label printing is just one component of an Access database I am developing for them. And I could either print from Access or pass the card information into a Word mail merge to handle the printing. Thanks for your reply!

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If you’re still not settled on a solution, here’s a crazy idea that occurred to me:

If the membership cards are small enough, could you create a cardboard “jig” (that’s a woodworking/machining term) that would fit into the CD tray of a CD-print-enabled ink jet (and always be aligned consistently–perhaps with an alignment mark on the tray and jig?). If the jig has a cutout the size of one card, and if you create a CD print template (with the standard card layout) that prints only in the area occupied by the membership card, you’d be able to print single cards anytime without a lot of extra work and no waste.

I’ve no experience with CD printers, so I’m assuming that the printer won’t print where it knows the center hole to be (in which case this approach would depend on the card’s being small enough). If that assumption isn’t correct, then you’d have the entire area the size of a CD to play with. I’m also assuming that the “CD” (i.e., the jig) won’t spin as the tray is inserted into the printer.

I’d assume that your client would still batch print larger runs as is currently done.

If you do try this, please let us know how well it works.

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The solution used by a client of mine who wants a very professional finish is not to print the cards themselves at all. The database exports the data, and it is sent off to a Print Shop that produces the cards. Can’t do 1 at a time, but small batches are sent off every few days.
These people looked into the Card Carrier letters referred to above, and found them far too expensive.
Another client prints the ‘cards’ on plain paper, then uses that information to handwrite the membership cards. She has very neat writing.
It was claimed to me that some inkjet printers can handle individual cards, and some people solve this problem that way.
Unfortunately any really professional looking finish is likely to be expensive. All the good looking cards I have, for instance, have rounded corners. Any solution that involves cutting card up with scissors will have an amateur look to it, in my view.

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johnhutchison’s suggestion is another method. Depends on how professional handwritten will look for your application?

I am suprised johnhutchison’s client found the card carriers too expensive? Perhaps that might have been because they did not want to print the cards themselves? – As I said in my previous post, pre-printed cards are custom stationary and VERY expensive. What I was talking about was completely blank cards, stuck on completely blank sheets. These seemed fairly inexpensive if you shop around, as I found from my limited searches on your behalf. This way they would have rounded corners also if you wished?

Can the person in the office cut straight with scissors? It might be so much easier to just use a guillotine instead? Phototrimmers can be had for under $10 and should be good enough for low-volume applications like this?

There is another alternative I’ve thought of – A “punch” can be bought for membership cards. It has a “window” that the card is centered in and then pressed down. The membership card is pressed through the window, guillotineing all the edges at the same time and they can be bought with round or square edges to the punch. The punch though might be around $100, so might not fit in their budget though.

Nate01pa and browni – Dot matrix printers with tractor feed fan-fold paper with sprocket holes do indeed still work well, so well that the National Health Service in Britain still use them extensively, particularly for printing prescriptions. They could be upgraded of course to laser printers, but the microperforations in the paper and the clearly dot-matrix printing are now considered an extra layer of security as it makes them harder to forge, even if the blank prescriptions are stolen.

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TK, John, et al: Thanks for all of your ideas and comments. I have also been experimenting with cutting down a sheet to reuse and that is actually working out quite well. I can get a 10-card page cut down to the final 4 cards (2-up), and still print on two of them. I have also been looking into carrier sheets for individual cards. I found one for a particular printer, but I am still looking for more choices as an option.
I think might use Avery id card stock (e.g. 8377) for ease of use. But if they don’t like the thickness, I think the guillotine/punch solution is going to be necessary. As Super Mod pointed out, hand-cutting just doesn’t cut it (sorry about that). I don’t think they will be concerned about the fancier rounded corners for this project, so that will help simplify the project.
I’ve got your replies printed out for my research, so we’ll pursue these different approaches and see what works best for this project. – george

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Bethel95,
That is something I have thought over, though I like CD option. I will probably not do this right now, as I am testing out a programming solution that lets me plot the card on the left or right side, as needed. This seems to be working out okay, as I can print one card on the left or right, consecutively, for 3 to 4 rows. I’m waiting to hear what my client says.

However, if that doesn’t work out, I will try this idea, but using a regular 8.5×11 sheet with the “jig”, to work with their existing laser printer. Thanks for the idea!

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I just recently saw a fairly simple Access VBA routine that prints on multi-label pages and skips however many (used) label positions that you want, each time you print. So you tell the routine where to print the label on the sheet, and can print one at a time. I don’t recall how many different Avery numbers it was compatible with, but it could be a solution that is only as expensive as the card stock. And I’ve seen cards that are die cut on a sheet and could serve your purpose without waste.

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Donnyg – yeah, I wrote a simple routine to handle something like this, on a left-and-right basis, tearing off each row as they are used up. So I only have to worry about position 1 and position 2, as it were.

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