baconsprite - the crisp CSS spriter

CSS sprites are a vastly efficient way of optimizing the number of HTTP requests necessary to present a graphically rich user interface. However, maintaining and optimizing CSS sprites by hand is downright a bitch, and a task that no actual person in their right mind can be bothered with.

The solution? A simple command line tool, that takes a definition list and turns a shitload of images into a series of sprites, which are optimized, and spits out a CSS file for background positioning of the sprited images. Beautiful, right?

Building and installing

Before building and installing baconstrip, you need to make sure that the following dependencies are installed on your system:

• cmake
• gdlib

Once dependencies are met, building and installing is as easy as the following:

./configure
make
make install

Input format

baconstrip relies on a definition list, usually named sprites.bs or something like that. .bs files are simply JSON files following the schema laid out below:

{
    "css":
    {
        /* Output filename of the positioning CSS file */
        "output": "Sprites.css",
        
        /* Defines whether CSS minification should be applied or not, default is true */
        "minify": true
    }, 
    "sprites": [
        {
            /* Output filename of the sprite file */
            "output": "SpriteAbsolute.png",
            
            /* Behavior of images. Possible values are no-repeat, repeat-x or repeat-y */
            "behavior": "no-repeat",
            
            "images": [
                {
                    /* Input filename of the image */
                    "input": "MyImage.png",
                    
                    /* Output the size in the CSS file, default is false */
                    "outputSize": false,
                    
                    /* CSS selectors, can be either a string or an array of strings */
                    "selector": "div.someclass"
                },
                ..
            ]
        },
        ..
    ]
}