imagemagick convert: japanese text broken in freebsd

[Nikola Lečić]

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On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:20:23 -0800 (PST)
cuongvt <freebsd at vuhanhnhu.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> I know that IM support japanese text.
> On Freebsd 7.0 with latest imagemagick built from port (6.4.7) and
> msgothic.ttc copied from windows partition,
> imagick extension of PHP installed by pecl.
> in terminal (zsh) I type:
> ================
> convert origin.jpg -fill white -font
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/msgothic.ttc -pointsize 125 -stroke
> blue -strokewidth 1 -draw "text 20,130 'がくせい'" straight.jpg
> ========
> IM did not informed any error, but the result is japanese text broken
> (question marks).

Hello,

It works for me with ImageMagick-6.4.5.5 and ImageMagick-6.4.7.5.
First, please make sure that the cause of the problem is not something
simple, i.e. make sure that

  a) you don't have a wrong /non-UTF-8/ locale (not very likely since
     you wouldn't get question marks);

  b) you compiled ImageMagick with IMAGEMAGICK_TTF and
     IMAGEMAGICK_FONTCONFIG.

If these are the case, then it's almost certain that fontconfig is
somehow confused with that Microsoft font. For example, see this
thread on XeTeX mailing list about Microsoft YaHei font:

  http://www.tug.org/pipermail/xetex/2007-May/006539.html

If you use -text directive without -font specified, ImageMagick will
use the fonts from

  /usr/local/lib/ImageMagick-6.4.7/config/type-ghostscript.xml

and this will produce question marks with Japanese UTF-8 string, which
seems to be the case. So, if you don't want to use some free
non-Microsoft font, you can try to do this:

  1) Regenerate fontconfig cache ('fc-cache -f -v' as root).

  2) Check if MS Gothic is visible to ImageMagick, i.e. try

       %convert -list font

     The output should contain

       Font: ＭＳ-ゴシック-標準
         family: ＭＳ ゴシック
         style: Normal
         stretch: Normal
         weight: 400
         glyphs: /path/to/msgothic.ttc

     in ja_JP.UTF-8, or

       Font: MS-Gothic-Regular
         family: MS Gothic

     in en_US.UTF-8 locale.

  3) Then try

       %convert orig.jpg -font ＭＳ-ゴシック-標準 -verbose -fill white \
         -pointsize 125 -stroke blue -strokewidth 1 \
         -draw "text 20,130 'がくせい'" straight.jpg

     if you use ja_JP.* locale (-font MS-Gothic-Regular if you use
     en_US.UTF-8 -- note that the command is locale-sensitive) and see
     if this makes any difference.

Best regards.
- -- 
Nikola Lečić = Никола Лечић
fingerprint : FEF3 66AF C90E EDC3 D878  7CDC 956D F4AB A377 1C9B
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