I just had a moment, preparing some business cards for print, and I was exclusively using Free Software. I wanted to share this small moment of joy with you to describe some of the tools I used.
First up was the Inkscape vector drawing program (probably the finest drawing program in the world). Need to expand the page to include the 3mm bleed? Not a problem, simply Page > Document Properties... > Resize page to drawing or selection. Alas you can't put paragraph spacing in Inkscape, but to align discrete text blocks? Oh yes, Object > Align and Distribute > Make vertical gaps between objects equal. Then Save As > PDF and we're away.
However, the printer wants the business cards as one PDF file, and I have front and back as two separate PDF pages. The answer, PDF Chain, a GUI front-end to pdftk, "the PDF toolkit". Add the two files to the Merge tab and click Save. Simpler than simple.
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