Convert HTML files to PNG

For some stupid reason I ended up having to convert a whole lot of HTML files to images. Not wanting to waste space, the plan was to compress the files as much as possible without loosing too much quality.

So here’s how to do it:

for f in *.html; do
  wkhtmltoimage -f png $f $f.png
  mogrify -trim $f.png
  pngquant --speed 1 $f.png --ext .png.o
  mv $f.png.o $f.png
done

Here’s what each line does:

  • for f in *.html; do will loop through each .html file in the current directory
  • wkhtmltoimage -f png $f $f.png will convert the .html files to .png (see the wkhtmltoimage project page)
  • mogrify -trim $f.png will auto-crop the image and cut off the body padding, this saves a few bytes (see the mogrify documentation)
  • pngquant --speed 1 $f.png --ext .png.o compresses the .png files (note that pngquant uses lossy compression; to compress losslessly, use pngcrush instead)
  • mv $f.png.o $f.png replaces the original png with the optimised one