Heroscapers - DIY Cards: new Gimp version

As many of you here have no doubt already figured out, I tend to have a lot of ambition to produce cool things for the community, but not a lot of time to actually deliver on my big ideas. But for the past week I've been off, and somehow I managed to actually put together some time to work on HS stuff. And I think I actually got something here. It isn't any of the things I thought I was going to produce, but hopefully it's useful.

First of all, let me say that this wouldn't exist without KillMeForPrizes' quite excellent DIY cards for PhotoShop. I took that file as my base, and I opened it up in the Gimp, and I started to play. And I ended up creating this.

Which, if you haven't clicked on the link yet, is 1) a Gimp version of KillMeForPrizes' PhotoShop card, and 2) a complete tutorial for the Gimp-tarded, among which I number myself. I basically taught myself the Gimp with this project, so I probably haven't done everything right. I really welcome any help that anyone wants to offer to make this better.

So why would you use this version instead of KillMeForPrizes'? Well, if you have PhotoShop, you probably wouldn't. However, if you don't have PhotoShop, this might be quite helpful. The Gimp is completely free, and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. In addition, I rearranged things just a bit, so for instance now you don't need to crop your picture when you paste it in if it sticks out beyond the "window" of the card.

But the big thing that will be cooler about this version is that I've hacked together a Gimp plugin to do all the annoying text bits for you, based on a file that you build with all your custom's info in it. Now, I haven't published this plugin yet, firstly because it still needs a few tweaks, and secondly because I hacked it together so fast that I don't believe it'll run on any system but mine.

What I'd like is for someone who's very adventurous and has a decent amount of computer knowledge to PM me and try to get the plugin working on their system. It likely won't be easy, but hopefully by making it work on at least two systems we can find the changes that are necessary to make it generally useful.

For a rough idea of how much computer knowledge I'm talking about here, I'd say you'd need to be able to do the following three things (at a minimum): 1) You should be able to install the Gimp, and Gimp-Perl, and get them working. 2) You should be able to install -Perl-, and able to install new -Perl- modules. 3) You should be able to find the font files on your system and be able to type that directory into an ASCII file. If you don't think you can do those 3 things, you probably don't want to get into this.

So you'd probably like to see an example of the system at work, eh? Well, here you go. This is an updated version of my Triceratops custom completely redone using the new Gimp-ified DIY Cards.
http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2...riceratops.png
Please let me know if anyone tries it out and has success (or doesn't).