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Bruni
Asked: 2015-07-14 01:17:45 +0800 CST

How to print the output of tree to pdf without losing the color?

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I use the following command to print a directory structure to a file:

tree -h somepath/ > tree_of_somepath.txt

tree gives a nice colorized output on the terminal, but as expected this cannot be redirected to a text file. I would like to print the output of tree to a pdf file and preserve the color.

Any ideas?

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    1. Install the following dependencies:

      sudo apt-get install aha wkhtmltopdf

    2. Save your tree command output to html with aha:

      tree -C -h | aha > foo.html

      From the tree man page, -C forces colorization:

          -C     Turn colorization on always, using built-in color defaults
           if the LS_COLORS environment variable is not set. Useful to
           colorize output to a pipe.

    3. Finally export the html to pdf with wkhtmltopdf:

      wkhtmltopdf foo.html foo.pdf

    Example: 

    cd /tmp
tree -C -h | aha > foo.html
wkhtmltopdf foo.html foo.pdf
xdg-open foo.pdf

    enter image description here

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