Printing webpage using browser via CLI

browserchromecommand linefirefoxprinting

I want to automate printing. From URL in text file, the webpage is printed. I have tried using wget and the results are very inferior than when printed via browser. Somehow FF and Chromium both manage to convert webpages to "printability" format by redacting sidebars and such. Also, wget fetched webpages have no images. How do I make my prints look readable?

I am thinking of writing dumb macro for mouse and keyboard movements to manually do it using web browser, but CLI is better, less error prone.

There used to be an extension, but it is not maintained anymore and does not install on FF33.

Are there any ways to do it?

Best Answer

Printing via CLI

One method would be to use html2ps.

$ html2ps http://example.com/file.html | lpr

-or-

$ html2ps http://example.com/file.html | lp -d someprinter

Saving to PDF

As an added bonus if you just want to keep it as a PDF file you can use ps2pdf like so:

$ html2ps http://example.com/file.html | ps2pdf - somfile.pdf

References

Print a Web Page From a Shell Prompt

Related Solutions

Refresh/reload active browser tab from command line

Something to play with

It uses xdotool, which lets you script windows/desktop actions. If you supply the name of the browser as an argument, it'll find and reload the current page. You can set a default browser, so you don't need to supply one each time, and you can change whether you send a CTRL-R to reload, or SHIFT-CTRL-R to reload without cache.

It should flip to your browser, reload the page, then flip back to whatever window you called this from. I use this often by putting browser in background, with editor window set to 'ON-TOP' so it's always visible, hot-key this script, or call it from your editor, and it'll return your focus when it's done.

I'm a vim user, and I could see making an autocommand to automatically trigger this script whenever a given file was written, so the browser would refresh when appropriate, I know you can do the same.

#!/bin/bash
#
# L Nix <lornix@lornix.com>
# reload browser window
#
# whether to use SHIFT+CTRL+R to force reload without cache
RELOAD_KEYS="CTRL+R"
#RELOAD_KEYS="SHIFT+CTRL+R"
#
# set to whatever's given as argument
BROWSER=$1
#
# if was empty, default set to name of browser, firefox/chrome/opera/etc..
if [ -z "${BROWSER}" ]; then
    BROWSER=firefox
fi
#
# get which window is active right now
MYWINDOW=$(xdotool getactivewindow)
#
# bring up the browser
xdotool search --name ${BROWSER} windowactivate --sync
# send the page-reload keys (C-R) or (S-C-R)
xdotool search --name ${BROWSER} key --clearmodifiers ${RELOAD_KEYS}
#
# sometimes the focus doesn't work, so follow up with activate
xdotool windowfocus --sync ${MYWINDOW}
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${MYWINDOW}
#