Be sure to turn off the WYSIWYG editor for the "ImageMagick command line options: " textarea!

In the interest of saving others the time I lost...

It appears that the commands I was entering into the texatarea were bring wrapped in a

tag, which was screwing up the ImageMagick command.

As soon as I went to admin/settings/ckeditor and excluded the textarea (Fields to exclude/include: -> admin/build/imagecache/*) then went back to re-enter the command and retry it, it worked! It was a bit hard to debug, b/c the errors I was seeing from ImageMagick didn't make sense. I finally realized that it was complaining as if a line break had happened right after whatever I typed in, and nailed it down that way. The confusing thing was I kept going to "source" view and typing it in that way and no dice, even switching to "text-only" didn't work until I excluded this textarea completely.

Some ways I see to help with this:
1: Document the issue - suggesting to users that they exclude the textarea from their WYSIWYG tool as I did above.
2: or strip_tags() the commands to send to ImageMagick.

Thanks,
Hermes