--- title: Ruby script using inkscape to convert several svg to png slug: ruby-script-using-inkscape-to-convert-several-svg-to-png published_at: 2022-08-19 18:31:00 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:19 +0000 summary: description: Ruby script using inkscape to convert several svg to png Code: https://gist.github.com/cjavdev/5990cfa28ff9b0ea0b81a61854fa0c40 tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, svg, png, inkscape, dir, Dir[], glob, ruby globs, iterate over files ruby] views: 598 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/ruby-script-using-inkscape-to-convert-several-svg-to-png youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi-5MFGsMIM youtube_id: oi-5MFGsMIM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/oi-5MFGsMIM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oi-5MFGsMIM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Ruby script using inkscape to convert several svg to png *Published: August 19, 2022* *Views: 598* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi-5MFGsMIM) [![Ruby script using inkscape to convert several svg to png](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oi-5MFGsMIM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi-5MFGsMIM) ## Description Ruby script using inkscape to convert several svg to png Code: https://gist.github.com/cjavdev/5990cfa28ff9b0ea0b81a61854fa0c40 ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back in this episode you're going to see some just ruby scripting and we're going to mess around with some files the goal is that i'm trying to work on this video here that i'm recording for tick tock if you're not on tik tok it's super addicting to stay off but if you are uh follow because i'm doing a bunch of ruby content and posting it as the vertical videos or the social media clips on tik tok but one thing that i wanted to do for this specific video was drop in icons so inside of this repo for dev icon dev icon you'll find a ton of different languages frameworks stacks and their related icons as svgs what's really cool is there are just a ton of different icons so if we look for ruby we'll find ruby down here it even has like these beautiful svgs of ruby of like the ruby icon and so what i wanted to do was use these images inside of this video but it turns out screenflow doesn't support svg oh my gosh and so what we need to do instead is convert these to pngs so i cloned that repository and if we look at the directory structure here there's this icons directory and then inside of here there's a directory for all of the different languages and frameworks and you'll notice that for some of these it will also have a dot eps file in addition to some svg files so what i want to do is iterate over all of the files all of the svg files and i want to shell out to some convert command that's going to convert them from svg to png let's write a little ruby script to get started so i'm going to call this like convert to png dot and let's talk about this the dur class inside of ruby so dur is short for directory and there's a ton of different methods for working with an operating system i think a lot of people before using like ruby and ruby on rails for web development it was a really common tool for doing a lot of just like basic file management and like unix scripting stuff very much like pearl or like bash and so this dur tool set is super super powerful it's part of the standard library and one of the things that you'll notice is that it has this square bracket operator on the class level there's there's also like another useful thing uh where there's a class method that is a square bracket operator that's for hash but in the case of der this is sort of an alias two dir dot glob and der if we call this dur square bracket operator what we can do is we can pass an argument in here and this argument can be a glob or just like a sort of like you know this path matching things dot slash icons slash star start svg.each so this will give us back a list of all of the files that are in the icons directory in any directory and then our um any file name with the svg file extension so if we just print that that file name out and run this with uh ruby convert to pngs you'll see a giant list of all of the different svg files that we want to convert so that's pretty cool now what we can do is we can call yeah thanks uh copilot so we want to call inkscape so inkscape is this thing so inkscape is this drawing tool that you can use it also has a a way to interact with it from the command line and so what we're going to do is we're going to shell out to inkscape and we're going to pass in a couple different arguments here the first one is that we want to pass the file name the raw file name and then we want to pass dash o and then the out file so we're going to replace dot svg at the end with dot png that's going to be our new file name and then we're also going to say that we want the width to be 10 24 and the height to be 10 24 and then inside of the video i will like resize these things as needed but this should be a good start so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to put a return right after this just so that it only runs one time so let's try running this again so we're going to run ruby convert to png now if we do git status it created this file so let's open that up and see what it looks like okay this looks pretty sweet okay this is this is super cool i'm wow is this actually text inside of the png how does that work that must be cool a cool mac thing i don't know but it looks like it actually does have the transparent background and everything so that is pretty sweet and it was pretty fast too so what i want to do now is i'm just going to open up this convert to pngs thing remove my return cross my fingers and just let this roll let's actually um one other thing that we can because i expect this to take a uh quite a while because this conversion is going to happen across like hundreds or maybe thousands of files i expect this to take a while so what we could do just to know that the program is giving us or like just to see a little bit of feedback that the program is actually running i'm gonna use the print with a dot and this is similar to how you might expect tests to run right like you're gonna see all of your dots appearing as each individual tests run in sort of like the simplified format for a test by adding this print dot we'll have just a little bit of feedback about the progress so if we wanted to see all of the files and count how many there are we can do find all of the files in the current directory of type file with the name that ends in svg that's going to give us the whole list of files and then we can pipe this to word count and then dash l that's going to tell us how many lines there are so we're going to convert 793 files so if we say ruby convert to pngs now we should end up with 793 dots and if we didn't print out the dot we would just be sitting here waiting like when is this going to end like is this ever going to finish is something wrong is something broken while this is running i can open up a new tab and say git status and i can see all of these images coming in and we can actually take a look at some of these so maybe let's open up like this apache original and just take a look we'll bask in the glory the beautiful thing about using inkscape is that it does a really great job of making sure that the svg to png conversion happens and includes all of your colors and fonts and it's it's very very good at converting from svg to png before using inkscape i tried to use image magic and apparently there's some uh some gaps in image magic's implementation of their svg engine and so it doesn't perfectly map over into all of the same colors and stuff so all right it's still running it's still running it's still running this is looking good all right at some point inkscape printed out a giant warning message it's just a warning though so i'm not sure if that's uh if that matters also i'm not sure exactly which file that was for so we're just gonna let it roll done okay cool so there were a couple of different warnings that came from inkscape but i don't know which files they were and it really doesn't matter because at the end of the day i've got tons of pngs now drop a comment down below in the video tell me what your favorite dur method is what is your favorite method on directory because there's just so so many cool all right see you next time cheers [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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