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

Question

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?

If you don't need the color (as the OP does), you can still get usable tree output using tree -n -d --charset unicode > file. It's definitely not as pretty, but I use it with a monochrome laser printer when I'm herding my data files, etc.. — Joe, Jul 15 '15 at 21:18

score 25 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 02 '15 at 11:04

25

Install the following dependencies:
```
sudo apt-get install aha wkhtmltopdf
```

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.

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

edited Aug 02 '15 at 11:04

A.B.

92,275

answered Jul 13 '15 at 09:47

Sylvain Pineau

63,309

Perfect, though I omitted the --black to save some toner, when it lands on paper ;) – Bruni Jul 13 '15 at 09:54
@Bruni Good idea :) Let me edit the answer – Sylvain Pineau Jul 13 '15 at 09:55
$ wkhtmltopdf foo.html foo.pdf wkhtmltopdf: cannot connect to X server – uss Oct 27 '17 at 12:40

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

1 Answers1