delegates.xml not parsed?

[boblowski]

I'm still quite unfamiliar with the powers of ImageMagick, so perhaps this is a stupid question. System: Debian Lenny with ImageMagick 6.5.8 and GhostScript 8.70 installed by aptitude. Everything works fine and I can convert images through both ImageMagic as well as GhostScript. Now I read somewhere some tips on improving the output of GhostScript by editing the defined delegates in the file delegates.xml. After editing this file on my system (/usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.5.8/config/delegates.xml) however, I noticed that whatever I change in the file, it doesn't seem to influence anything the convert command does. I can even rename the file with no consequences.

After reading through the documentation and searching the forums I'm no wiser as to what I'm doing wrong. In the output of

Code: Select all

$convert -debug configure logo: null: 

there are the following lines:

Code: Select all

2010-01-20T21:29:11+01:00 0:00.000 0.010u 6.5.8 Configure convert[30610]: delegate.c/LoadDelegateList/1222/Configure
  Loading delegate configuration file "/usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.5.8/config/delegates.xml" ...
2010-01-20T21:29:11+01:00 0:00.000 0.010u 6.5.8 Configure convert[30610]: delegate.c/LoadDelegateList/1222/Configure
  Loading delegate configuration file "built-in" ...

Does this means the delegates.xml file has been read correctly, or does it mean the file could not be read and ImageMagick defaults to the built-in delegate configuration file? What should I do to make ImageMagick read my changed delegates.xml file?

Or am I missing some very basic step, like first having to initialize a changed delegates.xml file?

Thanks

[magick]

Type

• identify -list delegate

[boblowski]

Thanks for your reply. The 'identify -list delegate' command was the one that made me think there was something not right with the parsing of delegates.xml on my system.

In the meantime I found the cause, but I'm not sure as to why the problem occurs in the first place. On the system I first installed ImageMagick 6.3.7 from Lenny/Stable and later upgraded this to 6.5.8 from Squeeze/Testing. Now I noticed the old /usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.3.7/config/ dir is still present, and ImageMagick 6.5.8 actually reads the delegates.xml from that old dir, even though (if I understand the quoted output in my first posting correctly) it says it's reading the delegates.xml from the ImageMagick-6.5.8 dir. It's not even looking for the old 6.3.7 dir in the output.

Only if I remove the old /usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.3.7/config/ dir, then the delegates.xml from the 6.5.8 dir is being read. Not sure if this counts as a bug, but perhaps this problem occurs because of the way ImageMagick looks for the delegates.xml file? Or is this wanted behavior misunderstood by a new user?

Thanks again

[boblowski]

Mmm, this increasingly looks like a case of a new user misunderstanding things. Does ImageMagick actually give any explicit errors when a delegates.xml file has been found and read, but because of errors in the file is not parsed? I'm beginning to suspect my delegates.xml file was not correct in the first place (the quotes/" characters are handled differently from what I expected) and subsequently was silently dropped by ImageMagick. Which in turn made me think the file was not read at all. Does that make any sense?

Thanks