Add new font for ImageMagick on Mac OS X and Ubuntu

Use Case

I am developing a Rails application which can add some beautiful text on the image. So I used the powerful tool ImageMagick(wrapped by gem MiniMagick).

As I said I need to make the text looks beautiful, so I have to install some fonts on both my Mac OS X and Ubuntu Server which can be used for ImageMagick. For example, this beautiful Lato fonts.

on Ubuntu Server

Actually, on Ubuntu, there is already a package to intall. It’s very straightforward.

1. Install fonts-lato

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install fonts-lato

2. Find the font name to use

Find the available font list with:

mogrify -list font | grep Lato

#output
Font: Lato-Medium
  family: Lato
  glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/lato/Lato-Medium.ttf
Font: Lato-Medium-Italic
  family: Lato
  glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/lato/Lato-MediumItalic.ttf
Font: Lato-Regular
  family: Lato
  glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/lato/Lato-Regular.ttf

Then, just grab a font name like ‘Lato-Regular’ to use in the code.

on Mac OS X

1. Install Lato fonts

Download the Lato fonts from here. Unzip the download file. And copy any .ttf font files which you want to use to /Library/Fonts

2. Generate type.xml for ImageMagick

Make a new directory for ImageMagick local settings and cd into it

mkdir ~/.magick
cd ~/.magick

Grab the script to find all fonts and store them in a config file

curl http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/scripts/imagick_type_gen > type_gen

find /Library/Fonts -name *.ttf -o -name *.otf | perl type_gen -f - > type.xml

Go to ImageMagick config folder

cd /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/6.9.3-7/etc/ImageMagick-6

Edit system config file called type.xml and add line near end to tell ImageMagick to look at local file we made in earlier step

<typemap>
  <include file="type-ghostscript.xml" />
  <include file="~/.magick/type.xml" />  ### THIS LINE ADDED ###
</typemap>

3. Find the font name to use

Find the available font list with:

mogrify -list font | grep Lato

### output
Font: LatoM
 family: Lato Medium
 glyphs: /Library/Fonts/Lato-Medium.ttf
Font: Lato
 family: Lato
 glyphs: /Library/Fonts/Lato-Regular.ttf

Because the script generated the name is not as same as it is on Ubuntu Server. So we can manually edit the ~/.magick/type.xml file and change the name, then in the code we use the same font name.