align text to left with imagemagick

Question

I am using ImageMagick to add text to an image. I used to -gravity Center flag to put the text in the center of the image. But I think this is resulting in the text being center aligned too. I want the text at the center of the image but left aligned. Here is an example of what I'm trying to have:

This is the output I'm getting: Current output

This is what I want: This is my requirement

How do I accomplish this? This is my first time using ImageMagick. Please guide me.

Answer 1

Here is one way to do that in Imagemagick 6. I specify the background color, the font color (fill), the font and the pint-size and gravity west (left side). I use label: to create the two lines of text with a new line between them. This creates a text image of the size needed to hold the text. Then I pad the image all around that to the final size with the text image in its center using the same background color.

convert -background black -fill white -font ubuntu -pointsize 28 -gravity west label:"This is line 1 of text\nThis is line 2 of text" -gravity center -extent 400x300 result.png

See

https://imagemagick.org/Usage/text/ https://imagemagick.org/Usage/crop/#extent

ADDITION

If you want to put the text over an existing image, then you do something similar, but in place of the extent, we composite the text image over the background image.

The following is Unix syntax. For Window, remove the backslashes \ before the parentheses.

Input:

convert lena.png \( -background black -fill white -font ubuntu -pointsize 21 -gravity west label:"This is line 1 of text\nThis is line 2 of text" \) -gravity center -compose over -composite result.png

Result:

Or if you do not want the black background, use "none" for the color.

convert lena.png \( -background none -fill white -font ubuntu -pointsize 21 -gravity west label:"This is line 1 of text\nThis is line 2 of text" \) -gravity center -compose over -composite result2.png