Installing ImageMagick with DejaVu support

I've had troubles with DejaVu fonts in ImageMagick. Almost everything with -font 'DejaVu-Sans-Condensed' failed. Well, it was searching for the font, consuming much of CPU resources, and used default one afterwards. In this post I'll show how to compile ImageMagick from source with DejaVu support. Althouth it may seem trivial, the process may sometimes be tricky.

First off, install FreeType dev package. It should be called libfreetype*-dev or so. For instance, in Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev

Make sure you have DejaVu font installed. Package name should be named somewhat like 'ttf-dejavu'. In Debian you can install it as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install ttf-dejavu-core ttf-dejavu ttf-dejavu-extra

Download the source

Download tarball from http://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php and unpack it.

Find font directories

Figure out the main directory with fonts and a directory with DejaVu fonts, and specify them in configuration:

$ ./configure --with-freetype=yes --with-djvu=yes \
--with-fontpath=/usr/share/fonts/truetype \
--with-dejavu-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu 

Compile and install:

$ make
$ sudo make install 
# or 
# sudo make checkinstall
# whatever preferred/appropriate.

ldconfig

I had to make the follownig for my /usr/local prefix:

$ sudo ldconfig

Likely, you should do it also.

Verify

Verify that ImageMagick recognizes DejaVu:

$ identify -list font | grep -i dejavu

This should output a list with installed DejaVu fonts.

I hope this will be helpful for someone.