"unable to read font (null)"

[rmagick]

In the past couple of weeks I've gotten 10-12 requests for help from RMagick users who have just installed ImageMagick and RMagick. Their programs fail with the message "unable to read font (null)". Every time this happens we determine that they have either failed to install Ghostscript or they have failed to configure ImageMagick with the correct --with-gs-font-dir= option.

Until just a few weeks ago I had never seen this message. Has something changed in recent versions of ImageMagick that would cause it to occur more often?

[magick]

We have a patch for the problem you reported. We will make an early release of ImageMagick 6.3.2-4 with the patch sometime this weekend.

[anthony]

GraphicsMagick is not a solution. It is very far behind the developments that IM has made under version 6. Thats what people get for spitting off there own development path.

I myself had to make the decision about GM vs IM when I first started IM examples, but quickly relised just how out of date GM was. I not even program MagickCore stuff myself to implement new features and improvements.

I make no disparagement to GM's maintainer. I worked on a different project with him once before.