Troubleshooting

My antivirus flags it as a trojan

Windows Defender may report Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.C!ml. The !ml suffix means a machine-learning guess about the file's shape, not a match against a known virus, and Wacatac is Defender's catch-all for packed executables.

Cardwright is a packed executable that legitimately does three things malware also does:

• it is one self-extracting file (PyInstaller)
• it downloads and runs another executable on first launch, the Real-ESRGAN AI engine
• it replaces its own .exe when you accept an update

All three are visible in the source, which is public.

Check the file yourself rather than taking anyone's word for it. Every release lists the SHA-256 of both files. Run this where you downloaded it:

certutil -hashfile Cardwright.exe SHA256

If it matches the release page, you have exactly the file that was published. Only the portable .exe tends to be flagged; the installer usually is not.

The real fix is a code-signing certificate, which is not in place yet. Until it is, a report to Microsoft clears one build at a time, so each new version can be flagged again.

Windows says "unknown publisher"

That is SmartScreen reacting to any unsigned program, whatever it does, and it has the same root cause as the above. The releases on GitHub are the only official builds.

The printer says "insufficient memory"

See Printing Guide. In short: let the PC rasterise with Adobe Reader's Print as Image, and set that dialog's resolution to 600 or 1200.

My disk is filling up

An upscaled card is about 29 MB, so a big project adds up fast.

• Output folder… > Change moves where new cards are saved, for instance to a second drive. If that drive is not connected when the app starts, cards go to the app's own folder instead and it tells you once. Reconnect and restart, and it goes back to your choice. Cards already made stay where they were.
• Working files are cleaned up automatically. Older versions never deleted them, and on one install they came to 6.6 GB; from v2.17.14 each card deletes its own as it finishes, and whatever an older version left behind is swept when the app starts.

A card came out cropped, or kept a bleed edge

Bleed detection works by aspect ratio, which is a good guess but still a guess. Set MPC bleed to Assume none for an image wrongly flagged, or Assume bleed for one carrying bleed the proportions hide. It only ever runs on MPC picks and your own files. Cards from Scryfall, Gatherer, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Riftbound are never touched.

Some cards came back in English

Not every card was printed in every language. They are added in English and listed after the import. See Finding Cards.

I can barely see the cut guides

They are probably too thin or the wrong colour for the card. See Cutting.

The two sides do not line up

See Double-Sided Printing and Card Backs.

Something else went wrong

The Log button in the header opens a file with the full detail of any failure, including what was being fetched when it broke. It is capped at half a megabyte, so it is safe to paste.

Report it on Issues and attach the log: it is the difference between a guess and a fix. For something that is not clearly a bug, Discussions is fine.

Is printing proxies allowed?

Cardwright is an unofficial fan project. It ships no publisher artwork: card images are fetched from public sources when you ask for them. Proxies are for personal playtesting. Selling them, or passing them off as real cards, is not what this tool is for, and what you do with the output is your responsibility.