Create PDF file directly

[clayissimo]

Hi!

Thanks for this great tool :) Is there a chance to add a direct PDF export? The chat I am trying to export is huuuuuge and does not properly render in the browser - printing that as PDF will be a nightmare :-(

[mtln]

Hi
Can you give me some numbers? How many messages does the chat contain? How big is the .zip? How big is the chat .txt file in the zip? What browser do you use? I've been playing around with a test file containing 140'000 messages and it properly rendered in Chrome (but not in Firefox)
#10 (comment)

While rendering was no problem, printing such a large HTML as PDF is a problem indeed.
The upcoming version of chat-export will support a "non-interactive mode", so it can be called with parameters and will not prompt for additional input and thus be easily scripted. With this version, you could run the tool multiple times for the same export.zip, but different from- and to-dates, which allows you to easily create multiple smaller .html files.
In a future version, I'm planning to add an option to create multiple export files (with pagination) by limiting the number of messages per file. With this, you could set a limit that your browser can easily handle.
HTMLs have a huge benefit over PDFs, as media like voice messages or videos can easily be played. Also, HTML can be created without requiring additional libraries that the user would have to pip-install, so the tool usage is very simple and straight-forward.
Therefore, at the moment I will stick to HTML as export format instead of directly write PDFs.
A future option for direct PDF export could make sense for media-free renderings (ignore attachments completely, render only text messages).
Are you primarily interested in the chat message texts or are the attachments (images) important in the pdf? Does it make sense to have a "huuuuuge" single pdf from your "huuuuuge" chat export or would it be handier to have multiple files (per year, per month, per day, per 2000 messages or whatever)?