Sorry, don't want to interrupt this other thread-with-the-thread, but while I'm thinking about it, I thought I'd put forward a quick question[1] about GIMP and Script-Fu, for anyone with a finger well and truly within that particular pie: I want to know if I'm right that it appears that the standard Scheme(i.e. SIOD) functions/defines that are in-built to GIMP do not include arbitrary direct file-reading capabilities. i.e. the (fopen <path> <mode>) and (read[line] <stream>) functions, or similar.
It doesn't even appear to have (apropos <substring>) defined, in order to search for possible alternatives, and attempted Script-Fu console use of them suggests that they're missing, rather than that I'm not parametrising them correctly.
As I want to import (and pre-process via Script-Fu, that's easily done) some textual data in various ways (ideally, specifying an input file in a text-type field for, for menu-activated use of the fully-registered extension), it looks like I need to go for a full-blown compiled plug-in (or perhaps Perl-Fu... Perl seems to be my default fall-back at the moment, anyway!) either to do the whole job, or just to implement a function that bridges the gap between the 'missing' data-input procedures and the Script-Fu I've already written that translates data to the required effect.
Like the Script-Fu, my Google-Fu also hasn't helped me much. I'm thinking that this is probably because no-one (that I've seen!) has explicitly said it isn't possible, rather than because no-one has described what is possible in ways that my various refined search queries have matched well with, via the usual search methods.
(I was also kind of hoping that there'd be an easily portable method of making my GIMP extensions easily adoptable by others, once I got them doing what I wanted them to do, but if it goes so far as to need each person to 'make' at least some of the file components, that puts a small and yet not insignificant barrier in the way of ease-of-use by an 'everyman'. But I'm not au fait with anything other than homegrown scripting, within this particular environment, so I suppose it may be a lot easier than I'm fearing.)
[1] Here in a place I already can easily post to, rather than have to register for a new forum that I'm probably not going to want to say much on, beyond the point I've confirmed my suspicions.