"magick -list font" works in imagemagick-full 7.1.2-21 but not imagemagick 7.1.2-21

[ashugg]

Output of brew config

n/a

Output of brew doctor

n/a

Description of issue

I noticed this today when trying to use montage -mode Concatenate to tile two images together to make a new image:

$ magick -version
Version: ImageMagick 7.1.2-21 Q16-HDRI x86_64 51e1d5d97:20260421 https://imagemagick.org
Copyright: (C) 1999 ImageMagick Studio LLC
License: https://imagemagick.org/license/
Features: Cipher DPC HDRI Modules
Delegates (built-in): bzlib freetype heic jng jpeg lcms ltdl lzma png tiff webp xml zlib zstd
Compiler: clang (16.0.0)
$ montage -mode Concatenate -tile 1x 01.png 02.png output.png
montage: unable to read font `' @ error/annotate.c/RenderFreetype/1660.
$

(montage is a symbolic link to magick, which checks the name it was run as, and then runs in that mode accordingly.)

The resulting output.png file looked as expected, but this error/warning message about not being able to read a font seemed strange.

I have never used imagemagick from homebrew before, so I don't know what the last bottled version was where this error did not appear. (For comparison, on an Ubuntu Linux system with imagemagick 6, the same job does not produce any error messages.)

I found that ImageMagick/ImageMagick#8667 had been opened in April 2026 by another brew user, who at the time had imagemagick 7.1.2-18 installed. They were seeing the same error message, and wanted to know why montage was complaining about not being able to open a font when the command did not involve using any fonts.

Further investigation has shown that the imagemagick homebrew formula produces binaries that can't see the macOS system's fonts, but the imagemagick-full formula does. So, the workaround for the error message issue was to use imagemagick-full instead.

$ magick -version
Version: ImageMagick 7.1.2-21 Q16-HDRI x86_64 51e1d5d97:20260421 https://imagemagick.org
Copyright: (C) 1999 ImageMagick Studio LLC
License: https://imagemagick.org/license/
Features: Cipher DPC HDRI Modules
Delegates (built-in): bzlib freetype heic jng jpeg lcms ltdl lzma png tiff webp xml zlib zstd
Compiler: clang (16.0.0)
$ magick -list font | grep -c Font:
0
$ brew unlink imagemagick
Unlinking /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/7.1.2-21... 71 symlinks removed.
$ brew link imagemagick-full
Linking /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick-full/7.1.2-21... 71 symlinks created.
$ magick -version
Version: ImageMagick 7.1.2-21 Q16-HDRI x86_64 51e1d5d97:20260421 https://imagemagick.org
Copyright: (C) 1999 ImageMagick Studio LLC
License: https://imagemagick.org/license/
Features: Cipher DPC HDRI Modules OpenMP
Delegates (built-in): bzlib cairo fontconfig freetype gslib heic jng jp2 jpeg jxl lcms lqr ltdl lzma openexr png ps raw rsvg tiff uhdr webp xml zip zlib zstd
Compiler: clang (16.0.0)
$ magick -list font | grep -c Font:
1965
$ 

With imagemagick-full installed, the montage -mode Concatenate -tile 1x 01.png 02.png output.png command runs correctly with no error messages.

Both formulae are built with freetype support, but only imagemagick-full has fontconfig. I know imagemagick is intended to be lean, but maybe it needs fontconfig as well to work correctly?

[ashugg]

Thanks @ja51d for the explanation. Github rudely marked your comment as "low quality" but in fact I think it was high quality.

Including your recommendation here and I will mark the question an answered.

Recommendation:
Since you are on macOS and using commands like montage or annotate that rely on system font discovery, staying with imagemagick-full is the intended path. If you absolutely had to use the lean version, you would have to manually point to a specific font path using the -font flag or manually configure a type.xml file in ~/.config/ImageMagick/ to tell it where your .ttf files live.