Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

I've noticed a problem with the rendering of the date/time as part of the wallpaper drawn by the Variety app (http://peterlevi.com/variety/) using ImageMagick. It seems to have coincided with a recent ImageMagick update that was pushed out to Linux Mint (Ubuntu), which is why I suspect that instead of something on the Variety end of things (which hasn't changed since April).

It appears to be triggered by the use of the "-stroke" option within the clock_filter option in the variety.conf settings file. The border normally drawn by that option around the letters/numbers of the date and time are now making random patterns and squiggles for portions of the rendered image. I have screen captures I can post, if someone can recommend a (free) web site that I can link to in this forum posting. I guess I wanted to see what data I can investigate, or help provide, to help trouble-shoot the issue. Thanks in advance.

There have been other posts about problems with the latest Linux Imagemagick update. I would say you need to find the Imagemagick version you are using and you may have to do an upgrade.

What is your ImageMagick version and platform? Or does Variety include its own version of ImageMagick? You can upload to any free image hosting service, such as dropbox.com and put your URL here. Please also provide an example of the problem and the command you are using.

Looking at your link to Variety, I do not see any mention of the use of ImageMagick. Is imagemagick required for Variety? Have you checked with Variety to see if it is compatible with your updated ImageMagick. Perhaps you are using IM 7 and Variety can only work with IM 6.

Thanks for the responses. In terms of my current version of ImageMagick, This is what the output of "convert -version" gives: In the history of updates for Linux Mint (which I'm running) it shows an update from 8:6.7.7.10-6ubuntu3.7 to 8:6.7.7.10-6ubuntu3.8 on 7/24/2017, if that helps. I believe Variety will install ImageMagick as a dependency if it is not already installed, but I've seen posts online that seem to imply that Ubuntu (and Mint) include ImageMagick for some of the OS functionality. I did do some searching online, but didn't see much mentioned about issues with the ImageMagick update, so I guess I missed that.

According to the comments in the variety.conf file, Variety includes its 'clock_filter' option to, in turn, translate into some ImageMagick commands. It also includes a reference to http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/annotating/. I found an option in Variety to enable verbose logging, which will reportedly show what ImageMagick commands Variety uses under the hood. I can try to do that if it will be helpful

A question about posting image URLs: I don't have accounts with any sites like Dropbox, etc. Is it permissible for me to upload images to my own web site domain, and include the resulting URL?

Danno wrote:Is it permissible for me to upload images to my own web site domain, and include the resulting URL?

Yes. That's exactly what I do. If you put the URL between [ img] and [ /img] (but without spaces) it will be shown as an image.

Here are a few examples showing the mis-formatting:


https://ibb.co/c6bFkQ
https://ibb.co/cKVakQ

(Sorry - for some reason the first 2 entries with the tags don't seem to be embedding the images properly, so I added the links again separately)

Just ran Variety with the '-v' verbose option, and I believe the following entry shows the ImageMagick command involved:

IM 6.7.7.10 is ancient. But I suppose that the ubuntu distribution is patching without changing the version number. So it is hard to know what version you are really using. There could be a bug in the patch or the patch was not fully installed. Or they might have upgraded to IM 7, which may require the command to be changed from convert to magick. I am not that well versed on the Linux distribution packaging and patching to know what to tell you. I would suggest you present your issue to Variety with your process procedures and see if they can reproduce your issue. Do you have a good result that can be compared to a bad result for the same image and text? If so, please provide that.

P.S. It looks like this topic has the same issue. viewtopic.php?f=1&t=32405

My guess is that your Linux distribution may be patched with a buggy version of ImageMagick or was not patched properly.

I looked at the other link...it does seem possible they are the same issue, since that user mentioned Debian (which is further upstream to both Ubuntu and Linux Mint). I don't think it would help much to contact the author of Variety, as his code has not changed in many months, and he may have difficulty reproducing the issue. I supposed I can pursue reporting the bug to the Linux Mint team, once I figure out how to do that.

The rendering does occasionally produce a date/time with formatting that is either correct, or mostly correct. I'll try to capture that, and post later if I can.

Magick I try my best to back port.

Reporter could you try to bisect ?

The patches are under https://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-m ... magick.git branch debian-patches/version, it is easy to bisect. You could run test case doing ./magick.sh convert command

I am busy with private matter so please help me to debug

I opened Bug #1707258 with Ubuntu for the issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1707258

My Ubuntu bug was closed as a duplicate of another bug, 1707015 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1707015). It appears that some Debian patches further upstream caused the regression. A fix was just released, 8:6.8.9.9-7ubuntu5.9, which disabled the patches causing the issue. I've also included steps for downgrading the ImageMagick package (and related dependencies) to bypass the issue in the above link.