The goal of this adventure was to find the font that looked the best on a Massachusetts license plate, using ImageMagick.

I got the list of fonts using -list type fonts. This was run on two servers with different versions of ImageMagick, so there are two different ways to get the font list. Pick the one that works for you, or make your own.

The license plate blank came from R.T’s Blank Plates.

# This isn't worth automating, you will need to edit the font_list to strip out extra lines
#convert -list type fonts | cut -f1 -d ' ' | sort | uniq > font_list
# If the above won't work, try the next line
#convert -list font | grep 'Font:' | cut -f 2 -d ':' | tr -d ' ' > font_list
for f in $(cat font_list); do
echo $f
convert  ma1987.jpg -compose srcOver -gravity center \( -background transparent -fill "#7c2128" -strokewidth 1 -stroke "#777777" -font "$f" -pointsize "72" label:TAGLNZ -resize 230x -trim -sharpen 0x1.0 \) +composite MA-$f.png
done

This is one of the 270+ images that were created:

This is a good example of centering a label. The command line begins with the convert command, followed by the blank plate. ‘compose srcOver’ and ‘gravity center’ position the image labeled in parenthesis over the plate, and ‘+composite’ assembles the image.

Many thanks to the ImageMagick examples.

You can create your own license plate avatar at taglinez.com.