Offer HN: 20% off GIMP/Imagemagick powered kids books
http://www.littleheroes.com makes personalized kids books, so you can get a truly unique printed book (or ebook) for that little kid in your life. We're offering readers of HN 20% off all our books. Just enter HN2013 as the promo code at checkout.
Why is this on HN? Well ...
Since our books are all personalized (text & illustrations) we have a pretty unique setup. Our artists create Photoshop files that have layers for each hair colour/style, eye colour/style, clothing selection etc. We then run this each file through a python script that utilizes GIMP's script-fu language to extract each layer, retaining the alpha channel so we can recompose after.
Once a customer makes their selections, we create the PDF by merging the appropriate layers using imagemagick and then combine all of the PNGs into a PDF using ReportLab. The file is then printed, bound and shipped.
Check out http://www.littleheroes.com and see if there's something you like.