Chat to PDF, free

Your conversation goes nowhere

A chat export is the most personal file on your computer: everything you have written for years, the phone numbers, the pictures, the mood. Yet almost every ‘chat to PDF’ site starts by asking you to upload it to a stranger’s server. This page does not ask that, and could not: your browser reads the export, your browser writes the PDF, and the file never leaves your machine. No upload, no sign-up, no server-side storage — once the page has loaded it works in flight mode.

That is not a slogan, it is how the page is built: the work runs in a Web Worker, in the tab you are looking at. Close the tab and every trace is gone. Exactly one thing is downloaded, and only on your first conversion: the font the PDF sets the text in — with accents, as real, selectable and searchable characters rather than as a picture.

How to make the export

WhatsApp: open the conversation, choose ‘Export chat’ from the menu, then ‘Without media’ or ‘Include media’. The first gives you a .txt file, the second a ZIP with the pictures alongside the text. Both can be dropped here. The line format differs by phone and by language — Hungarian Android, US and UK English and iPhone shapes are all recognised, with a 12- or 24-hour clock, with or without seconds.

Telegram: in Telegram Desktop open the conversation, choose ‘Export chat history’ from the top-right menu, and pick JSON as the format (not HTML). The result.json in the resulting folder is what matters — or zip the whole folder if you want the pictures too.

Messenger: on Facebook’s ‘Download your information’ page, request the messages in JSON format. Each conversation gets its own folder holding message_1.json, message_2.json and so on — drop them here together and they are joined back into one conversation. Facebook’s export is notorious for mangling accents: here it is decoded back before anything reaches the PDF.

What goes into the PDF

A title page with the conversation’s name, its participants, the message count and the period, and then the conversation itself: your messages on the right in a highlighted bubble, everyone else’s on the left with their name in their own colour. A date header at the start of every calendar day, a time on every bubble, a page number at the foot of every page. Pictures — if they are in the export and you asked for them — are drawn inside the bubble, scaled down; videos, voice notes and documents get a labelled placeholder, because a PDF cannot play a video.

And what does not, said outright: emoji. The PDF’s font (Noto Sans) carries no emoji drawings, so every such character becomes a mark — one mark for a run of them. It is not hidden: it is the only honest option, because the font on its own would draw an invisible blank and it would look as though nothing had ever been there. Reply references, forward markers, edits, link previews and reaction emoji are left out the same way — a reaction keeps only its count. A conversation may be at most 50000 messages long; past that the oldest messages are kept and the title page says that it was cut.

Frequently asked questions