ImageMagic convert error: convert:not authorized `***` @ error/constitute.c/ReadImage/

Recently I got an error while converting from .tiff to .eps (Ubuntu 16.04 machine). This error happened for other file formats also. 

convert:not authorized `fileName.tif` @ error/constitute.c/ReadImage/***

convert:not authorized `fileName.pdf` @ error/constitute.c/ReadImage/***

convert:not authorized `fileName.png` @ error/constitute.c/ReadImage/***

A quick googling gave follwing solution.

Go to /etc/ImageMagic-c/

In this directory, edit the file policy.xml by using

sudo vi policy.xml

and edit the following lines.

<policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PS" />

<policy domain="coder" rights="read|write" pattern="EPS" />

<policy domain="coder" rights="read|write" pattern="PDF" />

<policy domain="coder" rights="read|write" pattern="TIF" />

<policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="XPS" />

Note that I wanted to convert TIF file. So I added the line

<policy domain="coder" rights="read|write" pattern="TIF" />

So, by adding "read|write" in the rights option, it the ImageMagic convert will work now.

But, after doing your job, it is better to change to rights="none" because of the security issue (which the actual reason for disabling)

Converting files ( to .eps or pdf) format

For scientific publications, figures are often asked in .eps format.

To do this (from formats like .tif/.jpg/.png), in linux, the package "convert" can be used.

Try this for a file name Figure1.tif

convert Figure1.tif Figure1.eps

This will produce a Figure1.eps file in the current directory.


Some times, you may want to convert a text file (like code) which is written using vim/emacs editor.

This can be done using LibreOffice (a open source) application.

In terminal, 

libreoffice --convert-to "pdf" fileName.txt

The output will be filename.pdf 

Or, open the file in LibreOffice and save as pdf.


If all these doesn't work, some times, I use following online site to convert to eps.

https://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-eps

In this site, you can specify dpi and many attributes of the output file.