How can I preview HTML documents from the command line?

One solution is to use lynx -dump, as in

lynx -dump file.html

or

echo "<div>this is a div</div>" | lynx -dump -stdin

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Better:

Use w3m -dump, it respects the page layout. It is awesome.

sudo aptitude install w3m
w3m -dump file.html
echo "<div>x</div>" | w3m -dump -T text/html

You can set the number of columns of the terminal for getting the better layout, for example, if you are using a full-window terminal, 200 can be a good try:

w3m -dump -cols 200 file.html

You can use html2text to look into an HTML document from command line.

sudo apt-get install html2text
html2text Webpage.html | less

but not exactly a look similar to man pages, it depends on the html input, of course.

You could use w3m which should already installed - if however it isn't

sudo apt-get install w3m

An example command syntax:

w3m -dump askubuntu.com | less

It can be used with both URL's as well as file-based html files

w3m -dump index.html | less