Nobody makes one certificate
They make a class of thirty, a league of fourteen, or every child who turned up. In a word processor that is: type a name, print, type the next name, print, thirty times, and get one wrong somewhere around the middle.
So the input here is a list and the output is a stack. One name per line, one certificate per page, in the order you typed them. A name that appears twice is flagged, because two identical certificates handed out in the same room is a worse problem than a name slightly misspelled.
A certificate is not a qualification
Worth saying plainly, because the same word gets used for two very different objects.
This prints something nice for a quiz night, a sports day or a five-a-side league, and it does that well. What makes a training certificate mean anything is the awarding body standing behind it. A border and a heavy paper stock do not create one, and neither does the word "certificate" at the top.
That is not a reason to avoid printing one. A certificate for finishing an in-house induction is a perfectly reasonable record that somebody attended and completed it, and plenty of employers keep exactly that. It is simply not the same object as an accredited award, and the difference matters most to the person who ends up relying on it.
The name is meant to dominate the page
It is the reason the thing gets kept. So it is set large, in the middle, with a rule underneath, and everything else is arranged around it: the heading above, what it was for below, the signature and the date at the foot.
A very long name is shrunk to fit rather than cut off. If it ends up smaller than the heading, that is the point at which dropping a middle name genuinely reads better than squeezing it in.
And it should say what it is for
One line. "For winning the summer quiz night." "For completing the site induction." "For most improved player." It takes ten seconds and it is the line people read straight after their own name.
A certificate with a name, a border and nothing else is genuinely just a piece of paper, and everybody who receives one knows it.
Print at 100%, and use heavier paper
Two things, and the first matters more here than on anything else that gets printed.
Turn "fit to page" off. It shrinks the sheet by a couple of per cent to clear the printer's own unprintable margin, and on a bordered page that shows up immediately as a border closer to one edge than the other. The border is set 16mm in specifically so that it survives a small amount of scaling, but scaling still throws it visibly off centre.
Use card. From about 160gsm it feels like a certificate rather than a printout. It is the cheapest single thing you can do to make one look worth keeping, and it is roughly the difference between something that goes on a wall and something that goes in a bin on the way out.
Everything is generated on your own machine. The list of names is never uploaded and there is no account.
Common questions
Can I make one for every name in a list?
That is the point of it. Paste the list, one name per line, and you get one certificate per page in that order. Nobody makes a single certificate: they make a class of thirty or a league of fourteen, and doing that in a word processor means typing a name, printing, typing the next name, and getting one wrong.
Is this an accredited qualification?
No, so here it is bluntly. This prints something nice for a quiz night, a sports day or a league. What makes a training certificate mean anything is the awarding body behind it, not the document, and a border and good paper do not change that. If somebody needs a card that a site will accept, that comes from the scheme.
Why does it nag me when there is no reason on it?
Because a certificate with a name and nothing else is a piece of paper. One line is enough: "for winning the summer quiz", "for most improved player". It is also the line people read first, straight after their own name.
Should I type the signature or sign it by hand?
By hand if you can. Leave the name blank and you get a ruled line with the role underneath, which looks better and takes thirty seconds for a stack of twenty. Type it when you are posting them out and will not have the stack in front of you.
Two people on my list have the same name.
The tool flags it, because handing out two identical certificates in the same room is worse than getting a name slightly wrong. An initial is usually enough to tell them apart.
A long name came out small.
It is shrunk to fit rather than cut off. The name is meant to be the biggest thing on a certificate, so if it ends up smaller than the heading, dropping a middle name genuinely reads better.
Why is the border so far in from the edge?
Because a certificate is the sheet most likely to be printed with "fit to page" left switched on, and scaling the page by two per cent moves a border sitting 5mm from the edge visibly off centre. Set 16mm in, it survives being scaled and still looks square on the paper.
What paper should I use?
Anything heavier than copier paper. From about 160gsm it feels like a certificate rather than a printout, and it is the single cheapest thing that makes one look worth keeping.