In the October 9, 2008, issue of this newsletter, I published an article named Thumbnails Appear like Magick, which demonstrated how to use an open-source tool named ImageMagick to create thumbnails from picture files stored in the IFS.

In response to that article, I received an email from Bryan Dietz, who discovered how to use the same tool to embed text in an image. That sounds like it could be a pretty useful technique, because you could use it put captions on your pictures, put dates on them, and so forth. So I thought I'd share Bryan's message with you.

I read your article "Thumbnails Appear Like Magick," and I found it very interesting. Thanks a bunch!

I was playing around with it and tried to use the convert program to create images with some embedded text.

$ convert -background blue -fill white -font AvantGarde-Book 
-pointsize 70 label:"Bryan Dietz" Me.png
convert: unable to read font '/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/a010013l.pfb'.

I searched around and found the ghostscript fonts here: http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs856/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz

I FTP'd them to /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts in my IFS, and then the conversion worked!

I haven't had time to test each font, but a sampling of a few worked.

Thanks again,
Bryan Dietz

Thanks for the tip, Bryan!