If you want to print a long list of words, it is better to format the word list into columns, otherwise you will print out one column pages, thus wasting a lot of paper. The command pr can be a helpful tool.
Suppose you want to print out all English words starting with shr, you will end up with a list of 86 words, as illustrated on the following lines.
The regular expression (grep) selects all words from the british-english dictionary on Ubuntu, matching the combination "^s[^aeiouy]": i.e. a word starting in s followed by a character which is not a vowel, followed by r. Apparently, there are four combinations possible: scr, shr, spr and str:
$ grep ^s[^aeiouy]r /usr/share/dict/british-english |
cut -c1-3 | sort | uniq -c
204 scr
86 shr
109 spr
358 str
If we want to print out even the smallest set of 86 shr words, you get two pages of one column. However, the tool pr will give better results.
In the following pipeline, pr uses 10 lines per sheet (-l 20, including header and footer lines), three columns (-3), and each item is numbered (-n). The extra commands reduce the extra page lines (tr) and the default tab-chars between the columns are replaced by blank chars (expand). Finally, pagination (lines starting with 2020) are replaced by a blank line.
$ grep ^shr /usr/share/dict/british-english | pr -l 20 -3 -n |
tr -s '\n' | expand | sed 's/^2020.*//'
1 shrank 11 shreds 21 shrews
2 shrapnel 12 shrew 22 shriek
3 shrapnel's 13 shrew's 23 shriek's
4 shred 14 shrewd 24 shrieked
5 shred's 15 shrewder 25 shrieking
6 shredded 16 shrewdest 26 shrieks
7 shredder 17 shrewdly 27 shrift
8 shredder's 18 shrewdness 28 shrift's
9 shredders 19 shrewdness's 29 shrike
10 shredding 20 shrewish 30 shrike's
31 shrikes 41 shrimp 51 shrinkable
32 shrill 42 shrimp's 52 shrinkage
33 shrilled 43 shrimped 53 shrinkage's
34 shriller 44 shrimping 54 shrinking
35 shrillest 45 shrimps 55 shrinks
36 shrilling 46 shrine 56 shrive
37 shrillness 47 shrine's 57 shrived
38 shrillness's 48 shrines 58 shrivel
39 shrills 49 shrink 59 shrivelled
40 shrilly 50 shrink's 60 shrivelling
61 shrivels 70 shrove 79 shrubs
62 shriven 71 shrub 80 shrug
63 shrives 72 shrub's 81 shrug's
64 shriving 73 shrubberies 82 shrugged
65 shroud 74 shrubbery 83 shrugging
66 shroud's 75 shrubbery's 84 shrugs
67 shrouded 76 shrubbier 85 shrunk
68 shrouding 77 shrubbiest 86 shrunken
69 shrouds 78 shrubby
If you want the result in pdf-format, send the result to a text file, then use a tool (for example, soffice) to convert the text file to pdf file:
$ grep ^shr /usr/share/dict/british-english | pr -l 20 -3 -n |
tr -s '\n' | expand | sed 's/^2020.*//' > words-shr.txt
$ soffice --convert-to "pdf" words-shr.txt
The result is stored in words-shr.pdf.