
Show HN: Printed Books from WhatsApp with Python and LaTeX - bkmn
http://beckman.io/whatsapp-books-a-hackers-guide
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spikewilliams
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.

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asenna
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!

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bkmn
Happy you liked it!

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m_eiman
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

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bkmn
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of Lulu!

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matteblack
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.

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motdiem
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.

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RaSoJo
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 :)

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bkmn
Haha, yeah that is a great christmas gift!

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tetraodonpuffer
> 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

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bkmn
That’s reasonable. In our case ”the very personal” usually mean opinions on
events and other people, stuff that is only sensitive if you know us. I
wouldn’t print logs that included bank statements, and I probably wouldn’t
print this kind of thing if I were a public figure.

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PanMan
I have to say this looks really nice. We have build a similar service with
[https://www.whappbook.com](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).

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

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bkmn
I’ll take a look! Thanks!

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neogenix
By the way, this is if you want to sell books through their API's. If you just
want to order something for yourself they have a separate service where you
can upload & buy:
[http://www.simpleprintservice.com/](http://www.simpleprintservice.com/)

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bkmn
Have you tried them? Good results?

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neogenix
They aggregate volume to leverage big printing facilities, so the products you
get are really high quality. (I've worked for them a couple of years ago).

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n4r9
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?

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bkmn
I try to keep them to 12 months each, ending at the last day of a specific
month. I’ve printed three books so far; you’d think the thickness of
individual books would vary a lot per year, but for our group it seems the
amount of chatting is constant :)

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n4r9
Ah okay, thanks. I'm thinking of doing something similar with a Hangouts
group. You can use "Google Takeout" to export your entire Hangouts activities
in JSON... so it looks like I'll need to do a bunch of my own parsing. It's a
fantastic idea though!

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g3orge
You should expand to facebook messenger.

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bkmn
Yeah, Messenger is on my list.

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0XAFFE
An example would be very cool.

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bkmn
Agree! I’m working on it, books hopefully delivered within two or three weeks.

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0XAFFE
What I meant was, adding a generated PDF with demo content.

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bkmn
Ah, ok. That should be doable.

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

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bkmn
Haha, that’s a great idea!

