strange Perl/Magick behaviors

[vrmerlin]

I have an existing Perl/Magick script that I am dusting off and trying to deploy on my new Windows 8 setup.

I installed ActiveState Perl 5.16.1 and ImageMagick-6.8.0-Q16.

I have one script (without Magick) that interacts with the file system and a MySQL database. It appears to behave fine.

My other script reads from the database and manipulates images referenced in the database.

When I run this command:

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$err = $image->Read($filename);

it produces an error message ($filename = 'D:/Photos/2003/2003-11-28 Anna builds tower of wood/20031128-1349-14.jpg'):

Exception 435: unable to open image `03/2003-11-28 Anna builds tower of wood/20031128-1349-14.jpg': No such file or directory @ error/blob.c/OpenBlob/2638 at generate_images.pl line 75.

Now, on a hunch, I padded the filename with characters at the front:

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$err = $image->Read('XXXXXXXXXXXX'.$filename);

For this, I get no warning, and the image appears to load correctly.

Now, I want to annotate the image, with this line:

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$err = $image->Annotate(x=>50, y=>$new_height-80, font=>'Times New Roman.ttf', pointsize=>50, fill=>'black', text=>"Hello World");

This produces a different error:

perl.exe: unable to allocate string `Invalid argument' @ fatal/string.c/CloneString/289.

If I remove the 'text=>"Hello World"' it runs, but of course doesn't write anything on the picture.

Any ideas what is going on? It appears to be that Magick isn't compatible with Windows 8 yet.

John