Imagemagick font errors for macOS users

[drbergman]

I have now twice run into issues with magick and fonts with it not being able to access the proper font files to either convert svgs into jpgs or convert svgs into a gif. The error has looked like this:

convert: unable to read font `' @ error/annotate.c/RenderFreetype/1660.
make: *** [gif] Error 1[3:54 PM]

Possible solution

Full disclosure: this solution worked on someone else's laptop and so I did not fully dive in to ensure this was robust or generalizable. But it did work.

Things that did not work on their own

I did run a few brew install commands to attempt troubleshooting that failed on their own:

brew install ghostscript # failed to solve the issue

brew install fontconfig # failed to solve the issue

The thing that did work

What did work was uninstalling and reinstalling imagemagick with the full package:

brew uninstall imagemagick
brew install imagemagick-full

And then everything¹ worked!

Footnotes

1. ok, we still had to brew install ffmpeg to get make movie working ↩