Introduction

This is a LESS CSS compiler written in C++.

A LESS CSS compiler compiles stylesheets in the LESS format to CSS. Read more on http://lesscss.org/

Differences from the original compiler

By default, this compiler does not apply formatting to the code. The CSS in the output contains no whitespace except where necessary. You can use the -f option to indent the output. If you need it to be more user-readable you can use a CSS formatter. Try CSSTidy: http://csstidy.sourceforge.net/

CSS comments are not included in the output. The purpose of this compiler is to produce the smallest amount of output as possible.

Parentheses are not required in compound values:

border: @width * 2 solid black;

The spin() function produces slightly different results.

There is an imgwidth() and a imgheight() function which can be used with image variables to access their dimensions. e.g.

    img.thumbup {
       content: url(browser/path/to/thumbup.png);
       @image: url('compile/time/path/to/thumbup.png');
       width: imgwidth(@image);
       height: imgheight(@image);
    }

Installation

If compiling from the source checked out with git you first have to run

./autogen.sh

to generate the configure script. This requires autotools. The tarball distribution will already have the configure script.

To build the compiler just run

./configure
make

This requires a c++ compiler and the libpng and libjpeg libraries. To build without the libraries run configure with these arguments:

./configure --without-libpng --without-libjpeg
make

After compiling you will have the binary lessc. You can run make install as root to install the binary.

Note that the original compiler is also named lessc.

Usage

To compile the LESS stylesheet stylesheet.less and write the resulting CSS to stylsheet.css run:

lessc stylesheet.less > stylesheet.css

or:

lessc stylesheet.less -o stylesheet.css

To also generate a source map:

lessc stylesheet.less -o stylesheet.css --source-map=stylesheet.map