Creating Colorful Console Hardcopies

If you’d like to hardcopy the content of a PowerShell console, you can copy and select the text, but this messes up colors and formatting.

A better way is reading the console screen buffer, and composing HTML documents. These HTML documents can then be copied and pasted into Word and other targets, and keep formatting and colors

The code below is certainly not yet perfect but illustrates the path to take:

function Get-ConsoleBufferAsHtml
{
  $html = [Text.StringBuilder]''
  $null = $html.Append("<pre style='MARGIN: 0in 10pt 0
      line-height:normal'
      font-family:Consolas;
  font-size:10 >")
  $bufferWidth = $host.UI.RawUI.BufferSize.Width
  $bufferHeight = $host.UI.RawUI.CursorPosition.Y

  $rec = [Management.Automation.Host.Rectangle]::new(
    0,0,($bufferWidth - 1),$bufferHeight
  )
  $buffer = $host.ui.rawui.GetBufferContents($rec)

  for($i = 0 $i -lt $bufferHeight $i++)
  {
    $span = [Text.StringBuilder]''
    $foreColor = $buffer[$i, 0].Foregroundcolor
    $backColor = $buffer[$i, 0].Backgroundcolor
    for($j = 0 $j -lt $bufferWidth $j++)
    {
      $cell = $buffer[$i,$j]
      if (($cell.ForegroundColor -ne $foreColor) -or ($cell.BackgroundColor -ne $backColor))
      {
        $null = $html.Append(
"<span style='color:$foreColor;background:$backColor'>$($span)</span>"
        )
        $span = [Text.StringBuilder]''
        $foreColor = $cell.Foregroundcolor
        $backColor = $cell.Backgroundcolor
      }
      $null = $span.Append([Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlEncode($cell.Character))

    }
    $null = $html.Append(
"<span style='color:$foreColor;background:$backColor'>$($span)</span><br/>"
    )
  }

  $null = $html.Append("</pre>")
  $html.ToString()
}

Note that this function requires a true console window, so it won’t work in the PowerShell ISE. When you run the code above, it provides you with a new command called Get-ConsoleBufferAsHtml.

To hard-copy the current console content to a HTML file, run this:

 
PS>  Get-ConsoleBufferAsHtml | Set-Content $env:temp\test.html   

To open the generated HTML in your associated browser, run this:

 
PS>  Invoke-Item $env:temp\test.html  

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