Book Image

ImageMagick Tricks

By : Sohail Salehi
Book Image

ImageMagick Tricks

By: Sohail Salehi

Overview of this book

<p>The book is packed with interesting and fun examples. We had a lot of fun coming up with cool ways to demonstrate ImageMagick's power, and we're sure you'll have fun learning how to create them.<br /><br />Although the printed book is in black and white, there is a full colour PDF of the screenshots freely available that includes all of the images in the book. Use it to see exactly what the ImageMagick effects look like in colour, or browse through it and see just what you'll learn to do with this book.<br /><br />ImageMagick is a free software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images using text-based commands. The commands can be issued from the command line, but more often will be included in web or desktop applications &acirc;&euro;&ldquo; carrying out complex image-manipulation tasks in response to the user's input.<br /><br />ImageMagick is a popular way for generating images on-the-fly in web pages, whether it's generating thumbnails from a large image, or creating complex combinations of images, text, and effects chosen by a visitor or the web site's creator.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ImageMagick Tricks
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
5
Identify, Display, and Import
Index

Chapter 7. Conjure

In the earlier chapters, we learned that besides ImageMagick command-line utilities, there are several compilers and interpreters that we can use to accomplish custom image processing tasks. ImageMagick utilities have an internal interpreter called conjure that is suitable for users who don't have access to any compiler or interpreter.

The conjure utility can process ImageMagick scripting code, which is known as MSL (Magick Scripting Language). This language is a variant of XML. As a matter of fact, every command and option is represented in the form of elements. We will study the MSL coding notations in this chapter.

The brief description of conjure functionality includes the following steps:

  1. First the customised image processing commands should be written in an MSL file.

  2. Then we have to call this file as a parameter using the conjure utility in the command line. There are some extra options in the command line for conjure that we will discuss.

  3. ImageMagick processes these...