Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

I'm fairly new to this so apologies up front.
I want to make a multi-page pdf (8.5"x11"-letter) contact sheet based on the contents of a folder using a batch file. So far so good. Where I run into trouble is: I want margins around the outside of the content so that it prints correctly on a printer (also so it looks nicer). I feel like I'm very close with the code below but all my content is left and bottom aligned (all the margin winds up above and to the left). I'v tried a couple of things like adding "+50" to my page tag, but my labels start to lose alignment and get cropped. I tried gravity and that broke it so that nothing showed up. I read elsewhere someone solved this problem by running the resultant pdf through montage again to add the margin, but I can't get that to work (I get an error message). Thanks in advance
—Tim

Resize your images small enough that you leave room for the margins, via your -geometry setting. Then do the montage. Then add a white border around the outside with enough thickness in pixels to produce 1 inch of margin. Your density is 150 dpi so for one inch, the -border value would be 150. Therefore you need to reduce the pixel dimensions of your images by that much divided by the number of tiles in X and similarly in Y.

Alternately, you can do what you have, then resize the montage smaller to allow for the one inch all around and the add the white border. However, that would do an extra resize that would cause some small extra blurring of your images. So the first way is best.

Please, always provide your IM version and platform when asking questions, since syntax may differ. Also provide your exact command line and if possible your images.

See the top-most post in this forum "IMPORTANT: Please Read This FIRST Before Posting" at http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-se ... f=1&t=9620

For novices, see

http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-se ... f=1&t=9620
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/comma ... essing.php
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/reference.html
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/
https://github.com/ImageMagick/usage-markdown

Hi fmw42,
Thanks for your response.
I had read the before posting but was in a rush when I posted and forgot to add my version info:
ImageMagick 6.9.0-1 Q16 x64 2014-12-22
I think I'm not clear on what your recommending. I added "-border 150" to my above script and this is what I got:
https://imgur.com/PKLZC8K
here is what I had before:
https://imgur.com/a/MMvapqD
and here is what I want (roughly):
https://imgur.com/odjzURy
are you suggesting a 2nd command to apply the border or is this contained in the same montage command?
Thanks again for your help

So you want a border around each tiled image, not a border around the montage. Is that correct?

If so, then you need to add the -bordercolor and the -border arguments. For example, try this

montage lena.jpg -duplicate 3 -tile 2x2 -background white -bordercolor gray -border 20 -geometry 64x64+20+20 lena_montage.jpg

fmw42,
I'm looking for the opposite of that. I want a border around the montage. like this:

Thanks again for your help

That is what I told you how to do earlier. Make each tile smaller via -geometry, then pipe the output from montage to convert - -bordercolor white -border 150.

Thanks! That's exactly what I needed. In case its useful for anyone, the code I've thus far settled on is below: and the result: