Letter avatar font - letters horizontally off centre

Further to:

It looks like some letters have gone off centre - perhaps because of a font update?

Not sure if this is all of them - but R, N, M and G are off.

The numbers in the image are the width of rendered pixels for the character left / right of the black line.

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It’s because we updated ImageMagick to the latest version due to ImageTragick and, like every time we change version, avatars got ā€œdecenteredā€ :expressionless:

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Don’t know a upgrade can do that…ImageMagick are so nice at API :sweat:
My multimedia project is generating letter avatar. I think I will go with OpenResty. Either way, I would tweak ImageMagick. And PR welcome here? I still need to center the avatar by all means. (<= Next week)

By the way, how you generate this graph? Looks good to generate for testing!

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I think the Discourse team has submitted the same, if not similar, PR to ImageMagick to fix this issue multiple times now. As future versions continue to break it.

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I was referencing letter_avatars microservice. There is a spot you can have an offset for those avatars.

Although, I will try to find the root cause

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Yeah, so was I. There have been times the offset was caused by a change in ImageMagick. I don’t really recall the details, may I can find the related topics here. I know there is also an offset table/array too.

I think this is semi-related
http://imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=28403

Granted now we’re talking horizontally instead of vertically

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This one was manual - didn’t trust ImageMagick for this.

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A PR against the microservice to realign letter avatars would be greatly appreciated. The problems we had keeping letters aligned previously were related to our pulling whatever counted as ā€œthe latestā€ IM version when we built the image; I’ve fixed that now so we depend on a well-specified version of IM, so we can have better control over when things go haywire. So, if you’d like to submit a PR with a set of manual adjustment tweaks, that should be enough to keep things in the right place from now on.

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Putting some tests on canvas. My local env does say different thing, so takes some time to dig into. When pointing to avatar services, got a lot of 500s.

Source: https://github.com/fantasticfears/letter-avatars-test

I would bet ImageMagick and fontconfig version will cause a lot of differences.


Update1: 500 is caused by…I exhausted the avatar service. Here is what we have now for official service:

Update2: @mpalmer My investigation is done. I would need the information of deploy environment to test the result.
I would bet MPC intermediate file will be much faster than PNG file, so I would update the command if applicable.
I can exhaust the service because of only 16 threads. But that’s because file IO. Nginx should queue all those requests before bombing the ruby scripts.

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Hi Eric,

The deployment environment is contained in the Dockerfile in the letter-avatars repo. We just point port 80 on the host to the puma running in the container, and let 'er rip.

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If you are using 120x120 images I would recommend making your black guide lines 2 pixels wide…
… otherwise they will always look off centre as 1 pixel does not evenly divide into 120 visually.

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