Discouraged

[teebe]

Hi, my aim is to create contact sheets from large directories of scanned film, trying to mimic film layout the most is possible. I started with Q16 and Win32, it worked quite smooth until I get across an example of vertical alignment:

montage font_*.gif -tile 1x3 -geometry 16x16+1+1 miff:- |\
montage - -geometry +0+0 -tile 5x1 montage_columns.gif

Here Win32 starts making trouble with pipe commands, especially when trying to translate bash to command metacharacters like in "miff:-".
So I started using cygwin and bash for Win32 and again I found troubles in the second piped command:

$ montage POSC*.jpg -tile 1x3 -geometry 16x16+1+1 miff:- | montage - -geometry +0+0 -tile 5x1 montage_col.gif
montage: unable to read font `/usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.4.0/config//usr/share/fonts/corefonts/arial.ttf'.
montage: unable to read font `/usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.4.0/config//usr/share/fonts/corefonts/arial.ttf'.

There are many suspect points: version of libraries does not match, double slash on path, etc etc
I tried to compile in cygwin but ./configure ends with error:

checking whether to build shared libraries... yes
checking whether to build static libraries... yes
checking how to run the C++ preprocessor... /lib/cpp
configure: error: in `/home/tiberio_b/ImageMagick-6.6.9-6':
configure: error: C++ preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check
See `config.log' for more details

Considering that I would like to resolve the main objective in time to deliver the whole job and the time spent on google trying to find a solution and repeat source and binary download and installation I am now more on the surrender side than other.
(Sometimes I wander how other does, this should not be an uncommon task)

HELP

Teebe

[whugemann]

At http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/windows/#for_recursive you'll find a more or less ready-made example how to generate index prints in a Windows batch file, without having to compile anything.

At the start of this webpage there are some general remarks on how to translate bash code to Windows batch files. Though I didn't really understand what you are trying to do with your batch code, I suspect that you didn't escape the pipe symbol (|) coorectly. It must be escaped with a caret (^), i.e. ^|. Same holds for the line continuation character, which is also the caret.

Wolfgang Hugemann

[teebe]

Hi Wolfgang, thank you for your promptly reply, eventually i made some better:

C:\...\...>montage -label %f -pointsize 75 1986_B\negcol*.jpg -tile 1x6 -geometry "1024x+4+4^>" miff:- | montage - -geometry +0+0 -tile 6x1 1986_B\montage.jpg

so apparently the troubles I found were cleared by re-installing IM Win32 Q16. Sounds good.
Appreciate your link on multiple directories, I will study the matter.
My last question is how cygwin had a so bad response, even if at moment I will not move into bash again, just if in the future I would like to use some perl script.
Where is possibly the error?
Tiberio