Fitting text to image [SOLVED]

[Brabantis]

Hello,
I am using ImageMagick on a Mac, and I wanted to use it to create a geeklet (for GeekTool) that would display info slightly rotated clockwise. I have a code that would fetch some text, then make a rotated image of it. The code I am using for simple texts is:

Code: Select all

{part of code that fetches the text}| /opt/local/bin/convert -rotate 15 -background none -fill black -pointsize 24 -font Courier label:@- -trim /tmp/label.png

It works fine, but I wanted to make it possible, for lengthier texts, to set the width of the image (before the rotation) and have the text adjusted to it. Until now I only managed to crop it.
Please ask for explanation if I was not clear, I am not a native English speaker.
Thank you!

[fmw42]

You need to create the text image before rotation. To get a specific width (before rotation), you need to use -size and remove the pointsize.

So something like the following should work (but in the current version, it is not expanding the text to fill the width). See viewtopic.php?f=3&t=22946


convert -size 200x -background none -fill black -font arial label:"some text" -rotate 15 output

[Brabantis]

Didn't work. From the little I know of coding, your method is for adjusting the size of the letters to fill the width; I just wanted the text to go to the next line whenever it would go over a certain width. Like in Notepad.

[snibgo]

(Notepad is a Windows text editor that word-wraps. It needs to know the font size and page margins, of course.)

"label:" can't word-wrap. "caption:" can. See http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/text/#caption

As fmw42 says, do the rotation after the "caption:".

[fmw42]

Didn't work. From the little I know of coding, your method is for adjusting the size of the letters to fill the width; I just wanted the text to go to the next line whenever it would go over a certain width. Like in Notepad.

Sorry that was not clear in your earlier post. So (as snibgo said) use caption in place of label

convert -size 200x -background none -fill black -font arial caption:"some text" -rotate 15 output

Note that the rotation will make your resulting image bigger than the 200 width. I assume you understand that.

[Brabantis]

That didn't work either. There re a couple things I noticed though. First, as far as my limited skill goes I cannot use "label" or "caption" because the text is not fixed, but the result of the previous script. Also "rotate" didn't work if not in the first position, and it did not seem to work with "size".
My problem is that I am writing a widget that displays an RSS feed on my desktop, and I wanted it to fit on a rotated square of parchment; id wouldn't fit if I don't wrap the text.

EDIT: Ok, I found a solution by tweaking the first script. Thanks anyway

[snibgo]

What version IM are you running? If "-rotate" needs to be first, it must be a very old version. If so, I suggest you upgrade.

[Brabantis]

I upgraded last week

[anthony]

If the text is not fixed, you need to generate a caption for each of the text strings, then rotate.

There is no other way to get rotated and word wrapped text, caption (and pango) are the only word wrapping text to image converters in IM.

[Brabantis]

Yes, but I solved by altering the other code, the one that generates RSS feeds