"Print" text file to images with layout from command line

Question

I have long journal files that I would like to view as images. I don't want to have to screencap my text editor. I am using LibreOffice to Export them to jpg, but I have to do everything ONE. STEP. AT. A. TIME. I am looking for some kind of command line layout program that would ostensibly look like this:

$ txt2jpg -i myfile.txt -o mynewfile --format=jpg --height=872 \
--width=600 --margins=40px --font=monospace

This would take myfile.txt as input and create a series of files named mynewfile01.jpg, mynewfile02.jpg, ..., mynewfileNN.jpg as output. The images would be 872 pixels tall, 600 wide, have a 40 pixel margin all around and use a font named monospace. Obviously, the actual program would differ in the particulars, but should be capable of taking one text file and outputting a series of jpgs (or pngs or bmps or whatever) as output with the ability to format the output image fontsize and so on.

Answer 1

A traditional tool for printing simple text files is enscript. This produces PostScript output. You can convert this to an image in many ways. One that gives good results is pdftopng which needs the PostScript packaged into a pdf as input (eg with ps2pdf) and produces png image files. So, using convert from ImageMagick to convert to jpg you end up with:

enscript < myfile.txt --media A4 -f CourierBold10 -o - |
ps2pdf - >out.pdf
pdftopng -mono out.pdf out # creates files out-000001.png etc
for f in out-*.png
do convert -resize 600x872 "$f" "${f/png/jpg}"
   rm "$f"
done
rm out.pdf

Your output is in files out*jpg.