After a bit of guesswork I found the problem! Because - on webservers - there is no graphical environment, there is no need to install any fonts. Therefore, when Image::Magick looks for fonts that are standard on all systemts, it cant find them. The solution i used was to install gsfonts (on debian
) and I assume something similar for other distributions. ImageMagick fails silently if it cant find the font - which is very irritating of it.