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?

Answer 1

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