Spent the weekend in Karlsruhe at Jens's place and as expected we did nothing but hacking... As a result the BumpMap plug-in has become much better (you could even say, it is working as expected for the first time now). A lot of foxes jumped over dogs while we hacked together a mockup for what could become GIMP's new text-tool. We now have a plug-in that renders text using the FreeType2 library and it does an extremely good job at it. There are still some minor problems with the bounding box and the code needs a review (and a Makefile etc.) before it can be released.