Creating New Decks

The important thing to remember with decks is that they are folders like any other. For the program to recognize it as a deck, and not a folder, there has to be a file named 00.xxx and there are no other folders inside it. It is important that your deck folders only contain appropriate files, as described on this page.

Within each deck folder you should have all the card images, named simply "00", "01" etc., up to "77", or however many cards there are in your pack. For regular tarot packs you should number the cards up as follows: first the major arcana 0 through 21, then clubs, cups, swords and coins in that order. The significance of this order is that these are how the cards will be sorted if you select either of the "sort ascending" or "sort descending" options from the menu.

Tip: In the current version of the program the treatment of leading zeros in the names of the cards is not very logical. For historical reasons, because the program was first designed to handle only Tarot Decks with 78 cards, it expected the name of every card to be a two character string. For this reason the program still requires that the cards 0-9 all have a leading zero. Since then the program has become more flexible and there is no upper limit on the number of cards in a deck, but if you have a deck with a hundred plus cards and are tempted to use leading zeros to make all the card names three digits long, sadly in the current version of the program this will not work. Apart from the cards 0-9, which as we have said need to have a single leading zero, no leading zeros should be used. For example if you name a card 062 the program will not recognize it.

Having named (numbered) your cards appropriately you need to ensure that they are placed in the right folder on your computer.

By default the correct folder is the one named "Packs" in the program directory, although you can override this and set another folder using the Folders Tab of the Options Form. The name given to each deck folder will be the name of the deck as it appears in the main menu.

The program will open image files of types .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, and .png.

If you want to include an image for the card backs, you should call it simply "Back" and include it in the same folder. It can be in any of the formats mentioned above, e.g. "Back.jpg", "Back.gif" or whatever.

To include a customized background image with the deck, name it "bkg" and include it in the same folder as the cards and other files.

Once you have finished adding files to your deck, open it up in the Orphalese Tarot (you may have to click on "Refresh" on the My Decks menu) and launch the Options form. Then navigate to the Current Deck tab of the Options Form. There you can edit the details of the deck that will appear in the About Box when the deck is used, including information about the deck, author, publisher etc. This data will be saved in the packinfo.xml file which the program generates and adds to the deck.

If you want to include a set of Little White Book style card notes then the best way would be to edit them using the Edit Card Notes window where you can also give a unique name to each card (something which is obviously more relevant to non-conventional decks of your own devising).

If you are interested in creating your own decks you may want to see the advanced topics Deck Transparency and Vector Graphics.

These notes are saved by the program in the files CardData.xml and PersonalCardData.xml which are generated automatically by the program.

Tip: In summary, this folder must contain a 00.xxx image file, and could contain any amount of numbered .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, and .png. files, as well as a back.xxx, bkg.xxx, CardData.xml, PackInfo.xml, PersonalCardData.xml. It can not contain any additional folders.