ImageMagick for yearbook/photo directory pages

[danmc]

Hello,

I'm trying to decide if Image Magick is the right tool for the task I have in front of me. I'm working on compiling a photo directory (to be printed) for my church. My inputs are:

top_directory/
family1/
family2/
family3/
...

inside of each of the family* directories is a single portrait photo and an XML file that has names as they should appear in print along with one or more last names that are used for sorting the photos.

What I need is software that will load all of these XML files and produce full page images with something like 3 columns and 4 rows of the family portraits that include text below each photo with the subjects names. In addition, I may have a selection of page background images that can by cycled through.

So I'm trying to decide if ImageMagick is the right tool for this. I can, and have, written a fairly short perl script that can suck in all the xml files and get the picture file names associated with subject names and everything is sorted. From there I was thinking of either perlmagick directly or use perl to write out a big command line to convert. Where I'm a little worried is the text and if I can have text wrap automatically or if I'll have to do a bunch of manual tweaks. Also I feel like precise page layout is a bit of a headache in ImageMagick but that could easily be pilot error.

Anyone have thoughts about this? I am functionally literate in things like shell scripts, perl, awk, etc. Totally clueless about python and ruby. Should I be looking at something more like inkscape? I've only ever used that from the GUI and then export via command line.

Thanks
-Dan

[snibgo]

I'd say it depends on your desired output. If this is a series of raster images that you can output to a physical printer, ImageMagick could be very useful. It can place images on pages, overwrite text, and so on.

It isn't a publishing system. It renders text as pixels. Your desired output might be a PDF to be sent to a commercial printer, who might render text at 3000 dpi. In this case, you wouldn't handle text with IM.