Using ImageMagick from nip2

final update: nip2 now wraps the whole of ImageMagick, click Toolkits / Magick and take a look.

update: this is now a standard part of nip2. Click Filter / Magick and have a look.

The development version has an experimental link to ImageMagick in now, built more-or-less in the style of this earlier blog post. There's a Filter / Magick menu with five sample operations, the most complex of which is Annotate, the ImageMagick operation for adding text to an image.

The sourcecode for the Annotate menu item is pretty simple:

Annotate_item = class
  Menuaction "_Annotate" "add text annotation" {
  action x = class
    _result {  
    _vislevel = 3;
               
    text = text_widget;
    font = Font_widget;
    geometry = Geometry_widget;
    gravity = gravity_widget;
    foreground = foreground_widget;
    antialias = antialias_widget;
    command = magick_command (join_sep " " [
      font._flag,      
      antialias._flag, 
      gravity._flag,   
      foreground._flag,
      "-annotate", geometry._flag, "\"" ++ text.value ++ "\""]);

    _result = system command x; 
  }    
}

But goodness me it turns into a beast when you click it:

It can probably be made a little prettier, but it does need all those options. I suppose sections could be folded away until you needed them.

The menu item supports nip2 Groups, so you can select a set of images and operate on them all at once. There's a toggle in Preferences that lets you switch between ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick (it just prepends "gm" to the command line that gets run). The "command" item shows the command that nip2 is running to generate the image. It knows about adding a ".exe" to the end of the executable name on Windows, though I've not tested that yet.

It seems unlikely that much of the wrapping could be generated automatically: it's just too hard to work out which options modify which operations. Someone would have to go through the docs and make a class for each major command. At least the things are fairly brief.