In a previous tutorial we went through some tedious steps to generate 3 images that could be used to create a page shadow. The great thing about the GIMP is that anything you can do with a mouse and keyboard, you can also do via script.

We will generate the following images automatically:

Why script it?

• It allows us to tweak settings and quickly re-generate the image to see the results. For example, we can ask ourselves, “I wonder what it’d look like if the shadow was a bit bluer?”
• We can automatically generate multiple images (including, for example, a image suitable for a CSS sprite).
• We can can adapt and re-use the scripts for different websites. For example, one website might use square angular edges, but another might use rounded corners – so you can adapt to use rounded corners in the background image by changing 1 line of the generation script.
• Mice are evil – why involve a mouse when all we need is a keyboard?

Read on…