Time came for me to check out some test prints of both the creature and event card templates. In reality it’s not really a conventional printer that will do the work. Instead, I have sent them in to a photo lab, where the “test prints” will be developed as digital photographies on high quality matte photo paper.

While playing around with the templates in Inkscape to prepare a couple of test cases for the digital photo lab I discovered that Inkscape couldn’t do a bitmap export of them in a format that the photo lab supported.

At that point I could just have used GIMP or any other editor to open and re-save the PNG-images from the Inkscape export into whatever format I wanted, but I chose a different path since that would have to be done to over 20 images, one by one (if one doesn’t know the delicate secrets of the terminal in combo with GIMP ;) )

Thus, I started my quest for a user friendly – yet powerful – open source solution for easy batch processing of image files. Thanks to durand I found out about a powerful and flexible easy to use piece of software that met all of my criteria: Phatch.

For anyone that craves after a nice GUI and powerful batch operations, this program would be it. And trust me, when developing a CCG it will likely come to good use plenty of times as having to deal with 200 – 300 cards is really something that should be handled by batch processing and nothing else.