URL to PDF conversion on OS X

Question

I am trying to create a bash function called url2pdf:

wget -O "$1" | /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert | open -a Preview

However, whenever I try and execute this, I get:

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: “STDOUT”

[ <=>                                                                          ] 0 --.-K/s   in 0s      


Cannot write to “-” (Broken pipe).

So I am guessing there is something wrong with my pipe redirection. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

the convert program doesn't seem to like STDIN streams that come from pipes:

ian-cs-macbook-pro:temp ianc$ echo "Hello world" | /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert
Usage: convert [ options ]

Options:
...snipped...

Try using TMPDIR instead:

function url2pdf {
    HTML=$TMPDIR`basename $1`'.html'
    PDF=`basename $1`'.pdf'
    wget -O $HTML $1
    /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert -f $HTML -o $PDF
    rm -f $HTML
    open -a Preview $PDF
}

That's crude, but it works. You can tweak to suit your tastes for saving the PDF on disk or not.