Show HN: Printed Books from WhatsApp with Python and LaTeX

I could see an application for this in the field of disaster risk management. After a hurricane for example, WhatsApp channels are becoming used to coordinate response and recovery efforts between multiple different organizations. There is a need for a tool that can extract all the information that gets shared into a report that can be used for analysis of the big picture.

This would make an awesome gift. I&#x27;ve been planning on doing exactly this with my girlfriend&#x27;s conversation for quite some time now, but just haven&#x27;t been able to get to it.<p>Also, my chat history is so large, it craps out while exporting the chat. I&#x27;ll try to see if I can do something about it.<p>Thanks for sharing!

If neither Blurb nor Publit appeal to you, I&#x27;ve been using Lulu.com for making hard copies of our blog about our kids. Seems to be the same price as Blurb, and has a UK division.<p>To generate the PDF, I use a nasty Python script to scrape the blog entries and images and massage then into LaTeX. Nasty code, but at least it works :P

I once created a little python script that would find an input search term in a WhatsApp chat archive. I have a similar chat with friends with almost 4 years of history, and a lot of daily activity, so it was cool to get a snapshot of what we spoke about.<p>But this is a much more useful, and novel, tool.

This looks good. It&#x27;s a great way to keep a memory of long running WhatsApp chats. Even without printing, this makes for a neat memento.

This is going to be a great Christmas gift for the family. Thanks for posting this in September. Gives me enough time to put in the effort :)

&gt; Our conversations range from lolcats to the very personal — just like life itself<p>I am not sure I&#x27;d feel comfortable sending a &quot;very personal&quot; conversation to a printing service, maybe I am too paranoid, but I&#x27;d rather investigate into getting some sort of home-book-binding kit and doing that as opposed to sending it off to be printed

I have to say this looks really nice. We have build a similar service with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whappbook.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whappbook.com</a> where we&#x27;ve automated the whole workflow, and give it a bit more whatsapp-like design. &#x2F;end plug :). (I&#x27;m running the technical part at Whappbook).

Take a look at peecho.com, they ship worldwide, are cheaper and don&#x27;t require you to make it PDF&#x2F;X-3 compatible.

I&#x27;m curious: how do you decide where to end the book? Did you make the cut based on length, or did you go in and look for a &quot;natural&quot; endpoint?

You should expand to facebook messenger.

An example would be very cool.

Thanks for sharing. Do you put censoring things in your program? I need to hide somethings :)