Stratagem Card Maker

How to make a card

Quick facts

Questions

• Can I use these cards commercially?+
  The classical texts are long out of copyright and the font is under the SIL Open Font License, which permits embedding in documents and images. Our translations and layout are ours — for ordinary sharing, go ahead; for resale of the cards themselves, ask first.
• Why do the Chinese characters look right here but export as boxes elsewhere?+
  Because a web page can borrow a Chinese font from your operating system and an image export cannot — the rasteriser only sees fonts the page itself loaded. That is the whole reason this tool bundles a subset, and why the failure hides on a Mac, where the system font quietly rescues it.
• Does the card language follow the page?+
  Yes. Switch the page language with the pills at the top and the card follows, including the switch to traditional characters under 繁體. There is deliberately no separate card-language control — two language settings on one screen is a way to produce a card in a language you did not intend.
• Why are there only 39 key lines and not the whole treatise?+
  Three lines per chapter, chosen as the sentences each chapter is actually remembered by. Publishing the full text as cards would be republishing the book one image at a time, which is not what a card is for — the chapter pages carry the surrounding argument, and each card links back to its own.
• Is anything I pick recorded?+
  No. The source data is fetched once as a static file, and everything after that — which card, which language, which style, and the image itself — happens in your browser. There is no request that carries your choice.
• Where can I read more about the stratagem on my card?+
  Every card links to its own page, which carries the origin story, the explanation and the modern application. The Strategy Map shows how the thirty-six and the thirteen relate, and the Counter-Stratagem Finder works the other direction — from what someone is doing to what it is called.
• What size is the exported image?+
  1080 by 1080 pixels, square, whatever screen you are on. The card is drawn at that size and scaled down to fit your column, so a phone and a desktop produce the identical file rather than an image the width of whatever column happened to be rendering it.
• Why is there no Share button on my computer?+
  It appears only where the browser can genuinely hand a file to another app, which in practice means most phones and few desktops. A Share button that quietly downloads instead is worse than no button, so it stays hidden — use Download card.
• Are the translations on the cards machine-generated?+
  No. All five language slices are authored and stored, and nothing is translated at the moment you press a button — there is no model call anywhere in this tool. The English key lines follow Giles' 1910 public-domain translation; the Malay and Indonesian renderings are our own.
• Can I make a card from a line that is not listed?+
  Not at the moment, and there is a reason beyond effort: the Chinese font shipped with the export covers the characters these 75 cards use, checked one by one. Free text could reach a character outside it, and the failure would not be visible on screen — only in the exported image, as a blank box.

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