Inline Icons in Text

Overall I would use InDesign for the cards. It is ideal for inserting graphics in text and applying a global style to the graphic, making it easy to consistently size and position the icons and make global changes to them if you change the text.

The cards can be treated as pages in a long document. InDesign is superior for handling multipage documents because global changes to margins and page backgrounds is much easier.

Illustrator is the program you want for editing graphics, like the icons and perhaps hte card backgrounds (although Photoshop is probably ideal).

In the end you should use InDesign for the card layout, Illustrator for the icons, and Photshop for images.

Thank you all. If I use a font editor to create a custom font, do I have to tie each icon to a single character? Can I not tie the string "GOLD" to a gold icon as a kind of text variable?

Hi!

 

I am looking at getting one of Adobe's programs.

It's understandable that you'd want to economize, but if this job went to a pro designer, a combination of applications would be used. Graphics would come through Illustrator and/or Photoshop as applicable, with final layout and typesetting done in InDesign.

Data Merge: InDesign

Symbols: if you place your images, you can manage them via the links panel.

Inline icons with replacement. You want the replacement to happen while you type? Then create a custom font and add the symbols into it as ligatures. You need a font editor such as FontSelf (plugin for Illustrator) or Birdfont or one of the more expensive ones such as Glyphs to create that.

Hi. Illustrator seems to be the better option for you. If you can use a "symbol" font to get the icons, you can copy and paste them to replace the text you need.