[GRLUG] Printing HTML emails from the command line

[Michael Mol]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 12:31 AM, Jeff DeFouw <jeffd at i2k.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 11:21:22PM -0500, Michael Mol wrote:
>  > My grandmother has an email account, but doesn't use the computer to
>  > check it. Instead, she wants me to.  I'd like to set up a cron script
>  > to automatically POP her email, and then print it out.
>  >
>
> > I'm not worried about spam.  It's a Gmail address, and she gets
>  > perhaps one or two junk emails a month.
>  >
>  > I'm handy enough with Perl et al to handle mbox; It's having something
>  > that can render the emails without an X display that I'm worried
>  > about.
>
>  Everything I've seen that you might be able to get to work uses X.
>  Could you use a virtual X server (Xvfb)?
>
>  There are several Firefox extensions for automated printing, but not
>  from the command line.  Maybe with a bit more code they could.  Or maybe
>  you could control the window with a script.  You could also save the
>  page to an image with the Screengrab extension, but there's no
>  command-line interface.  There's a commercial extension that will save a
>  web page to an image from a command line, but I don't see a built-in
>  print function.
>
>  There's a program called khtml2png that uses KDE libs to convert web
>  pages to images.  It doesn't need to show a window but it probably still
>  needs X.  You might be able to print the resulting images.
>
>  Also in KDE land, Konqueror can be easily controlled remotely.  Here's a
>  thread that describes printing a page:
>  http://www.nabble.com/Automating-firefox-td14785985.html
>  (Scroll to the bottom of the page.)


khtml2png looks like it'll do what I need, if I add Xvfb.  Thanks. :-)


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:wq