Configuration Files • Modules • Fonts • Environment Variables

ImageMagick depends on a number of external resources including configuration files, loadable modules, fonts, and environment variables.

Configuration Files

ImageMagick depends on a number of external configuration files detailed here:

coder.xml

Associate an image format with the specified coder module. ImageMagick has a number of coder modules to support the reading and/or writing of an image format (e.g. JPEG). Some coder modules support more than one associated image format and the mapping between an associated format and its respective coder module is defined in this configuration file. For example, the PNG coder module not only supports the PNG image format, but the JNG and MNG formats as well.

colors.xml

Associate a color name with its red, green, blue, and alpha intensities. A number of command line options require a color parameter. It is often convenient to refer to a color by name (e.g. white) rather than by hex value (e.g. #fff). This file maps a color name to its equivalent red, green, blue, and alpha intensities (e.g. for white, red = 255, green = 255, blue = 255, and alpha = 0).

configure.xml

Set ImageMagick build parameters and system-wide environment variables (e.g. MAGICK_TEMPORARY_PATH). As ImageMagick is built, a number of build parameters are saved to this configuration file. They include the version, release date, dependent delegate libraries, and quantum depth among others.

delegates.xml

Associate delegate programs with certain image formats. ImageMagick relies on a number of delegate programs to support certain image formats such as darktable to read raw camera formats or Ghostscript to read Postscript images. Use this configuration file to map an input or output format to an external delegate program.

english.xml

Associate message tags with English translations.

francais.xml

Associate message tags with French translations.

locale.xml

Associate message tags with a translation for your locale. ImageMagick has a number of informational, warning, and error messages that are represented as tags. Tags are short descriptions of a message such as FileNotFound or MemoryAllocationFailed. This configuration file lists locales that have a translation for each tag recognized by ImageMagick. Currently only English and French translations are available in the english.xml and francais.xml configuration files.

log.xml

Configure logging parameters. ImageMagick is capable of spewing copious amounts of informational or debugging statements. Use this file to configure how the information will appear in a log message and where you want the logging messages posted.

mime.xml

Associate an internet media type with a unique identifier. Many files and data streams have identifiers that uniquely identify a particular internet media type. For example, files in the "Corel Draw drawing" format (mime type="application/vnd.corel-draw") are associated with the filename pattern *.cdr, and also have an initial string of the characters "CDRXvrsn". ImageMagick uses combinations of this information, when available, to attempt to quickly determine the internet media type of a file or data stream.

policy.xml

Configure ImageMagick security policies. By default any coder, delegate, filter, or file path is permitted. Use a policy to deny access to, for example, the MPEG video delegate, or permit reading images from a file system but deny writing to that same file system. Or use the resource policy to set resource limits. Policies are useful for multi-user servers that want to limit the overall impact ImageMagick has on the system. For example, to limit the maximum image size in memory to 100MP:

<policy domain="resource" name="area" value="100MP"/>

Any image larger than this area limit is cached to disk rather than memory. Use width to limit the maximum width of an image in pixels. Exceed this limit and an exception is thrown and processing stops.

<policy domain="resource" name="width" value="8KP"/>

To limit the elapsed time of any ImageMagick command to 5 minutes, use this policy:

<policy domain="resource" name="time" value="300"/>

For convenience, define arguments for the memory, map, and disk resources with SI prefixes (.e.g 100MB). In addition, resource policies are maximums for each instance of ImageMagick (e.g. policy memory limit 1GB, the -limit 2GB option exceeds policy maximum so memory limit is 1GB).

quantization-table.xml

Custom JPEG quantization tables. Activate with -define:q-table=quantization-table.xml.

thresholds.xml

Set threshold maps for ordered posterized dither.

type.xml

Configure fonts. Define the font name, family, foundry, style, format, metrics, and glyphs for any font you want to use within ImageMagick.

type-ghostscript.xml

Configure Ghostscript fonts. The Ghostscript package includes a number of fonts that can be accessed with ImageMagick.

type-windows.xml

Associate names with Windows font glyphs.

Under Linux and Linux, ImageMagick searches for each of the configuration files listed above by looking in the locations given below, in order, and loads them if found:

$MAGICK_CONFIGURE_PATH
$PREFIX/etc/ImageMagick-