Saturday, February 18, 2012

Two little stumbling points of ImageMagick

IMHO, there are two little stumbling points when I use ImageMagick command line. The first one is for Windows only, but the other one is for all platforms.

The Convert issue

The official usage page explains what is "The Convert issue". This is because that any default Windows environment contains convert.exe command, so that there is the risk of conflicting with ImageMagick's convert.exe. This is the reason why Windows installer add ImageMagick's root path to the system path, not to the user's path. And you can also avoid this risk as written in "The Convert issue".

Command options are not liner.

In CUI commands, their command options generally have two simple rules.
  • Command options start with the character -(minus).
  • Command options are interpreted in liner.
But, in ImageMagick, these are not true. In other words, there are another two rules. You could find this in all over ImageMagick examples.
  • Command options start with... not only the character -(minus) but also the character +(plus). Plus option is the shortcut for corresponding minus option with default values.
  • Command options are interpreted with ()(paren) priority.
Off course, these rule is so powerful to generate complex image effects, but it's not easy for ImageMagick newbies.

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