Originally published January 26, 2020 @ 2:50 pm
On occasion I find myself struggling posting code on discussion forums that don’t handle code formatting all that well. What would’ve helped is some quick and easy way to convert code to an image file with syntax highlighting. And so here it is.
The first step is to install some prerequisites. Note: as of the time of this writing (2021-01-14), Inkscape does not work on WSL Ubuntu 20, so get 18.
apt install inkscape python-pygments imagemagick python3-pygments
In the script below you can modify a few things: font face, font size, and image size. You can list the appropriate fonts available on your system like so:
fc-list | grep -i mono
The script itself needs to be executed this way:
# To convert a single file code2png <file path and name> <output folder> <language> [<file extension>] # To convert multiple files code2png <input folder> <output folder> <language> <file extension> # Examples code2png /var/tmp/test01.sh /mnt/c/code_snippets bash code2png /var/tmp /mnt/c/code_snippets bash sh
You can install the script from my GitHub repo like so:
d=/var/adm/bin && f=code2png && mkdir -p ${d} && curl -s0 -k https://raw.githubusercontent.com/igoros777/kw/master/${f}.sh > ${d}/${f}.sh && chmod 755 ${d}/${f}.sh && ln -s ${d}/${f}.sh /usr/bin/${f}
And the script itself is below.
#!/bin/bash
fmt=svg
out=png
lang=""
ext=""
wsize=1280
source_path=""
target_path=""
if [ -z "${source_path}" ] || [ -z "${target_path}" ] || [ -z "${lang}" ]; then exit 1; fi
if [ ! -f "${source_path}" ] && [ -z "${ext}" ]; then exit 3; fi
if [ -f "${source_path}" ] && [ -z "${ext}" ]; then ext="*"; fi
if [ ! -d "${target_path}" ]; then mkdir -p "${target_path}" || exit 2; fi
find "${source_path}" -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 0 -type f -name "*\.${ext}" | while read f
do
pygmentize -O "style=monokai,fontface=DejaVu Sans Mono,fontsize=24" -f "${fmt}" \
-l ${lang} -o "${target_path}/$(basename -- "${f%.*}").${fmt}" "${f}" 2>/dev/null
inkscape -z -D --export-area-snap -b '#272822' -w ${wsize} \
"${target_path}/$(basename -- "${f%.*}").${fmt}" \
-e "${target_path}/$(basename -- "${f%.*}").${out}" 2>/dev/null
mogrify -path "${target_path}" -bordercolor '#272822' -border 20 \
-format png "${target_path}/$(basename -- "${f%.*}").${out}"
/bin/rm "${target_path}/$(basename -- "${f%.*}").${fmt}" 2>/dev/null
done
It’s a very simplistic version that begs for a rewrite. Alas, this was all the time I could spare. By all means, feel free to make improvements. Here are some output examples:
Experienced Unix/Linux System Administrator with 20-year background in Systems Analysis, Problem Resolution and Engineering Application Support in a large distributed Unix and Windows server environment. Strong problem determination skills. Good knowledge of networking, remote diagnostic techniques, firewalls and network security. Extensive experience with engineering application and database servers, high-availability systems, high-performance computing clusters, and process automation.
