Silly question about the blank card word docs

Word is really the wrong program to be doing this in, but it is possible.

This assumes Office 2003.

Insert your picture outside of a textbox. I added a blank page to make this easier. Right-click the picture, choose Layout, and choose Behind Text.

Drag the picture under the text box.

Select the text box. Right-click it. Choose Format AutoShape, Colors and Lines. Reduce the Transparency so you can see through the box. The text will fade too, so don't reduce it too far.

That's the best I could do, anyway.

You're much better off with a desktop publishing program or an image editor that handles text well, like Macromedia Fireworks.

Good luck,

Yogurt

I'm an avid MS-Word hater. It always does things automatically for me when I don't want it to, and it doesn't do things automatically when I wish it did.

I used Adobe Illustrator for Gheos' rulebook, but I'm not really satisfied with that either. Illustrator is great for making vector images and such, but it's a bit cumbersome when you have to edit lots of text.

What I'm looking for is a simple, light-weight text editor that also has some basic features for making vector graphics (lines, arrows, squares, etc). I really could do without all the overkill features of MS Word (which handles images poorly) or Illustrator (which handles text poorly). Preferably something shareware, freeware, or simply something cheap. Anyone?

I usually turn all those features off and then wish I had them on when I need them!
MS Word is surprisingly good at doing what you want it to do, once you've beaten it into submission so that it goes along with you. :-)
I generate practically everything in MS Word and Paint Shop Pro, and have rarely found the need to go beyond them.
I don't know of any good low-cost packages that handle text and vector graphics well though, so that's not much help. Sorry.

(edit: Shrike's suggestion below of Powerpoint is excellent though. It has some odd quirks, but some very useful features for this sort of work, if you can live with the learning curve.)

The software depends alway of what you want to do.

For example, I use "Latex" as word processor( or should I say text processor ) it is perfect for stuff like rule books. I also successfull make sheets of 9 cards that could be used for printing. There is also pdflatex which allows you to create directly pdf. Yes, latex is not really user friendly, there is a big learning curve especially if you are not really good with computers. But when writting long documents like books, you worship this software days and nights. For for example, I would not be able to make a complex character sheet or a newspaper page where the position of each image and text is important.

Same thing for graphic software. I dont' use much of them but for example, when making schematics for my online book I use corel draw with vertorial graphics, when I need to do pixel per pixel modification I use paint shop pro and when I need filters, special effect and high level function, I use the gimp.

NO problem. I have a friend of mine that HATES the fact that I use PP to do game stuff, but like I told him, you use what you know. ^_^