FAQ

My messages are on the left. Pass the exact name WhatsApp shows for you with --me. Repeat it for each name you appear under, for example your name on another phone.

Dates are wrong, e.g. 3 April instead of 4 March. Your export uses month/day order. Add --month-first.

Emoji show as empty boxes or plain text. No color emoji font was found. Install Noto Color Emoji (fonts-noto-color-emoji on Debian/Ubuntu) or pass --emoji-font /path/to/NotoColorEmoji.ttf.

Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese or other scripts look wrong. The bundled Noto Sans covers Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. Pass a font that covers your script with --font and --bold-font, e.g. Noto Sans Arabic or Noto Sans CJK.

Photos say "Media not included in export". The chat was exported without media, or WhatsApp left those files out. Export again with media.

The ZIP is huge. Will it work? Yes. Messages are streamed and photos are read from the ZIP one at a time, so memory use stays low. Runtime and PDF size grow with the number of photos.

A line of my chat isn't parsed correctly. Please open an issue with a few lines rewritten using made-up names and text, keeping the timestamps and punctuation exactly as in your export. Please don't attach real chats.