Well this is quickly becoming Mars' notes from building software on OS X blog!

Anyway, after following the official RMagick install, gem install rmagick fails with an error like:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-1.15.7/./lib/rvg/misc.rb:321:
in `get_type_metrics': unable to read font `/Library/Fonts/Verdana' (Magick::ImageMagickError)

It seems that the examples fail because of a spurious font choice in the documented examples.

All that is needed to build the RMagick gem successfully at this point is:

sudo gem install rmagick -- --disable-htmldoc

And voila, the examples aren't built, thereby avoiding the problem.

RMagick!

Which one is right for your Rails application?

In RMagick vs MiniMagick I will compare various aspects of these two Ruby image processing libraries.

Especially poignant if your app will be deployed in a shared hosting environment, save some brain-aches by weighing their differences before your code hits resource limits.

I'll be making this lightening presentation at Tuesday's Austin on Rails meeting.

Presentation (exported from Keynote): RMagick vs MiniMagick (PDF)

Mogrify is ImageMagick's command-line utility to transform images. I'm using it within MiniMagick, a Rails plugin that allows image manipulation with minimum memory usage compared to the more ruby-like RMagick bindings.

So the point of this post... Do you get errors like "mogrify: unable to open module file" when it's looking for a coder?

Read the rest of this entry