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Knowing that "How to convert from text to .pdf" is already well answered here link and here link, I am looking for something more specific:

Using Claws-Mail [website] and a Plug-In [RSSyl] to read RSS feeds I collected a lot of text files. These I want to convert into .pdf files.

Problem: The files inside the folders are numbered [1, 2, …, 456]. Every feed has its own folder, but inside I have 'just' numbered files. Every file contains a header [followed by the message's content]:

Date: Tue,  5 Feb 2013 19:59:53 GMT
From: N/A
Subject: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit
X-RSSyl-URL: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html
Message-ID: <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html>
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<base href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html">
</head><body>
<p>URL: <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html</a></p>
<br>
<!-- RSSyl text start -->

Question: A way to convert each file into a .pdf file and rename it, based upon the name given under Subject. Super-awesome would be converting and re-naming this way:

"folder.name"_"date"_"file name" with each information taken from the header data. As there are a few hundred files, I am looking for a batch processing way.

The files are html formatted, but without a .htm[l] suffix.

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5
  • 1
    Is the actual message marked up in HTML?
    – evilsoup
    Jun 23, 2013 at 11:25
  • Yes, it is - I've made an edit; thanks for the hint!
    – erch
    Jun 23, 2013 at 11:37
  • And I guess you would like the PDF to show the rendered HTML and not the HTML code?
    – terdon ♦
    Jun 23, 2013 at 13:10
  • @terdon: exactly. Converting HTML into .pdf with displaying the actual HTML code is an interesting idea… a very interesting idea :)
    – erch
    Jun 23, 2013 at 13:59
  • You never know, you may need to show your code to someone. :)
    – terdon ♦
    Jun 23, 2013 at 21:44

2 Answers 2

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2

If you have a relatively simple file tree where you have only one level of directories, and where each directory contains a list of files but there are no sub directories, you should be able to do something like this (you can paste this directly into your terminal and hit Enter):

for dir in *; do    ## For each directory
 if [ "$(ls -A "$dir")" ]; then  ## If the dir is not empty
   for file in "$dir"/*; do      ## For each file in $dir
    i=0;                         ## initialize a counter
    ## Get the subject
    sub=$(grep ^Subject: "$file" | cut -d ':' -f 2-);
    ## get the date, and format it to MMDDYY_Hour:Min:Sec
    date=$(date -d "$(grep ^Date: $file | cut -d ':' -f 2-)" +%m%d%y_%H:%M:%S);
    ## the pdf's name will be <directory's name> _ <date> _ <subject>
    name="$dir"_"$date"_"$sub";
    ## if a file of this name exists
    while [ -e "$dir/$name".pdf ]; do
      let i++;                       ## increment the counter
      name="$dir"_"$date"_"$sub"$i;  ## append it to the pdf's name
    done;
    wkhtmltopdf "$file" "$dir"/"$name".pdf; ## convert html to pdf
  done
 fi
done

NOTES

  • This solution requires wkhtmltopdf:

    Simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and qt.

    On Debian based systems you can install it with

    sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf

  • It assumes there are no files in the top level directory and only desired html files in all sub directories.

  • It can deal with file and directory names that contain spaces, new lines and other unorthodox characters.

  • Given a file dir1/foo with the contents of the example you have posted, it will create a file called dir1/dir1_020513_20:59:53_Civilized Discourse Construction Kit10.pdf

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0

You can always use the page title for name convention, so it should be unique.

Given file with list of addresses, here is the one-liner:

while read url; do wkhtmltopdf $url "$(curl -s $url | grep -o "<title>[^<]*" | tail -c+8).pdf"; done < urls.lst

where urls.lst is your file with list of urls.

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