Redirect `rtf` output to file

Question

System Info

alinuxchap@libertus-desktop:/usr/share/X11/xkb $ uname -a
Linux libertus-desktop 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64 GNU/Linux
alinuxchap@libertus-desktop:/usr/share/X11/xkb $ 

Cmd

cd /home/alinuxchap/Documents/shared/dat/EDS/it
echo "" > output.txt
while read author; do
    echo $author
    pdfgrep "$author" *.pdf |& tee -a output.txt
done <authors.txt

Problem

• grep outputs text matches in bold and red
• I don't want to use grep -p as I also need to see the 'snippet' of context the term is being used in

It's useful for archiving command output as 'logs'; the same problem arises with copy and paste, as that doesn't preserve rtf either.

Answer 1

For saving colors to a file, try adding --color always:

pdfgrep --color always "$author" *.pdf > output.txt

Then you can cat the file and it'll still be bold and red where you need it.

If for some reason you have a version of pdfgrep that doesn’t have these options (or you came here because you’re using a different program), you can instead put script -q /dev/null in front of the command to make a “fake” terminal:

script -q /dev/null pdfgrep "$author" *.pdf > output.txt

For converting to RTF, ansifilter is working pretty well for me:

pdfgrep --color always "$author" *.pdf | ansifilter --rtf > output.rtf

---

Basically, how this works is that pdfgrep writes some non-printing ANSI color codes. Red text starts with \e[0;31m and you can reset colors and formatting with \e[0m, so writing with red text looks like:

echo $'here is \e[0;31mred text\e[0m' # the $ makes it interpret `\e` sequences

But pdfgrep knows whether it's in a terminal that supports printing colors, so by default it will only insert these characters when they will do anything. You can override it with --color always.