Hi,

I am recently faced with interesting problem. I need to generate lots of 
2D graphics that consists of many different objects that have slight 
variations between them. As an example, let's say that I want to draw a 
full set of playing cards, like this:

http://www.fuxoft.cz/tmp/karty0.png

Now, I could paint this in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop but it was 
much faster to write this 2kb Povray script:

http://www.fuxoft.cz/tmp/karty0.pov

Which generated the above image.

What's also important is the fact that if I now want to change all the 
cards so that they have square format or they have more rounded corners, 
or whatever, it's very simple matter of changing few number in the POV 
script - in standard graphic program this would be a lot of tedious work.

Of course, it's not very elegant to use POVRAY for this lowly task. What 
is more important, POVRAY has to do 3D and lighting calculations which 
unnecessarily slow down the whole process (I need to generate LOTS of 
graphics like this).

In fact, POVRAY is almost perfect, except that it's too slow and exact 
vertical/horizontal lines have graphic artefacts on them even with high 
antialiasing (just magnify the the borders of the cards).

So my question is: Is there any application that would allow me to 
generate 2D sceneries using some sort of script language? It may seem to 
you that I could use any programming language with graphic capabilities 
for this, but note that it's ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for the result to be 
anti-aliased and to contain things like "glowing lines" and 
semi-transparent objects. In fact, Somehing like the graphic capabilites 
of Macromedia Flash. Except that Flash scenes cannot be generated using 
scripts and cannot be easily exported to bitmaps (e.g. to create 1000 
bitmaps using one small script in one go)...

Thanks for any suggestions

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