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've been planning on doing exactly this with my girlfriend's conversation for quite some time now, but just haven't been able to get to it.

Also, my chat history is so large, it craps out while exporting the chat. I'll try to see if I can do something about it.

Thanks for sharing!

If neither Blurb nor Publit appeal to you, I'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.

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.

But this is a much more useful, and novel, tool.

This looks good. It'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 :)

> Our conversations range from lolcats to the very personal — just like life itself

I am not sure I'd feel comfortable sending a "very personal" conversation to a printing service, maybe I am too paranoid, but I'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 https://www.whappbook.com where we've automated the whole workflow, and give it a bit more whatsapp-like design. /end plug :). (I'm running the technical part at Whappbook).

Take a look at peecho.com, they ship worldwide, are cheaper and don't require you to make it PDF/X-3 compatible.

I'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 "natural" 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 :)