Questions and postings pertaining to the usage of ImageMagick regardless of the interface. This includes the command-line utilities, as well as the C and C++ APIs. Usage questions are like "How do I use ImageMagick to create drop shadows?".
seems to have to do with -colors 256 making your image mostly black probably because the resize converted only a few colors into a lot of nearby colors and -colors 256 chose too many near black values.
this works, but I don't know if that is what you want
convert characters_heading.png -resize 97% -alpha off -alpha on -depth 8 test.png
and this works (kind of)
convert characters_heading.png -resize 97% -alpha off -alpha on -depth 8 -colors 256 test.png