ImageMagick and homebrew font problems

When you install (or upgrade) ImageMagick using homebrew on Mac OS X it has no fonts listed (you should see those that are available with magick -list font) ¹.

ImageMagick used to provide a script to generate a file (called type.xml) containing all installed fonts. However, this script appears to have disappeared 😞.

Typically, this file resides with the ImageMagick installation … and so gets overwritten when you do a homebrew upgrade imagemagick.

The solution

1. Create the directory ~/.config/ImageMagick
2. Use this perl script to create type.xml in the created directory. Download the script and change the suffix from ‘txt’ to ‘pl’. Run it from the command line using perl generate_imagemagick_fonts.pl. Confirm it has created ~/.config/ImageMagick/type.xml.
3. Check the installed imagemagick can see the fonts listed using magick -list font which should produce something like this:

Path: /Users/dje/.config/ImageMagick/type.xml
  Font: Academy-Engraved-LET-Fonts
    family: not defined
    style: Undefined
    stretch: Undefined
    weight: 0
    metrics: not defined
    glyphs: /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/Academy Engraved LET Fonts.ttf
    index: 0
  Font: ADTNumeric
    family: not defined
    style: Undefined
    stretch: Undefined
    weight: 0
    metrics: not defined
    glyphs: /System/Library/Fonts/ADTNumeric.ttc
    index: 0

Footnotes

1. And note that this command has recently changed from something like magick -font list, which now generates the cryptic error magick: no decode delegate for this image format 'list' @ error/constitute.c/ReadImage/753 ↩