Q: ImageMagick convert: Placing text on a book cover I am trying to make an eBook cover via ImageMagick, to be incorporated in a larger project after it works.
I want to get to geometry and gravity later, but at present I have two relevant images:


*

*A 1000x1600 JPEG background, which I lightened via GIMP enough so that it has no black or near-black pixels, and

*An 800x70 PNG author name with a single piece of text saved as black text against a transparent background.
(At present the 800x70 image is generated by Pango, and there may strictly be more options than compositing images; I expect it is possible to create a title and author name via Pango and circumvent image compositing. However, I would like to know that in addition to, and  not instead of, a basic invocation for image compositing that would place a PNG with alpha over a JPEG, and be able to control its position with -gravity and -geometry.)
I am trying to go off of ImageMagick's layering examples, and have tried a few variations of the following:
convert -size 1000x1600 -geometry +0+0 \
  -composite background.jpg -gravity center -geometry +0+0 \
  -composite author.png -gravity center -geometry +0+0 \
  result.jpg

What I get from this is an 800x70 solid black image, which I would expect to be what you get when taking transparency from a PNG like the author name to make a JPEG.
What should I be doing to (for now at least) get to the point where I have a 1000x1600 result image equal to the background with the author name placed on it in some intelligible place?
Thanks

A: Two issues:


*

*You shouldn't need the convert command for this operation.

*Your images are backwards in the command (the first image is the image to overlay on the second i.e. author then background).
This should give the results you want:
composite author.png -gravity center -geometry +0+0 \
background.jpg -gravity center -geometry +0+0 result.jpg

Arguably, you likely don't even need the second gravity/geometry combo:
composite author.png -gravity center -geometry +0+0 background.jpg result.jpg

