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If you plan to leave WhatsApp to go to another messaging application, you may want to save all your chats first so they are not lost forever. WhatsApp allows you to export the chats from the application, although it does so in a very rudimentary way, with a TXT file without any format and the photos and stickers separately.

If you want to have a copy of a WhatsApp chat and make it look like WhatsApp, you can always take a long screenshot, although in long conversations the result can be monstrous and without being able to search for text. Today we will tell you how you can view and print your exported chats so that they appear almost the same as in WhatsApp.

First, export the chat as always

In the past, WhatsApp did not securely encrypt the backup with the chat database, so it was possible to use applications such as Backup Text for WhatsApp to read directly from the database and export the chats as HTML, PDF, CSV or similar. These apps no longer work and the closest thing today, WaTweaker, requires root and currently doesn't have export or import enabled.

With this scenario, users who want to keep their chats basically have two options. The first, use WhatsApp export, a process that we have told you about on several occasions. To do this, you must touch the menu button ⋮ in a chat, then touch More and finally Export chat.

Next, you'll need to choose whether you want to include the media files (photos, videos, voice messages, stickers, animated GIFs) from the conversation or not, as well as which app you want to send it all to. You can use Gmail, to create an email with all attachments, Google Drive, to upload all files, or any other application you prefer.

We said before that there were two options, so which one is the second one? Use an unofficial tool to export chats from WhatsApp Web like this extension for Google Chrome. It works fine, although the resulting file (in JSON format) is also not easy for you to refer to later, so it doesn't have much advantage over the official WhatsApp export.

Then use a free online viewer

WhatsApp exports chats as one TXT file per conversation and a bunch of additional files for photos, stickers, and more. They're not pretty to look at, but luckily there are free tools like Chat Viewer, available here, to help you sort out the ballot. It is basically an online viewer to beautifully display exported WhatsApp TXT files.

The use is very simple, because all you have to do is press Select file and choose the TXT file that WhatsApp has exported. The web can be opened on the mobile, although it is a bit claustrophobic. If you use it on a PC, then you must first send yourself the TXT file of the exported chat to be able to open it.

Otherwise, there isn't much else you need to configure, except choosing who is the protagonist of the chat from the dropdown, which is filled with the names of the participants. The person you choose here will be the one represented as a green bubble, and the rest will have a white bubble.

Press Start Replay and the web will begin processing the chat. Keep in mind that if you have uploaded a very long chat, it may take a while for it to finish processing in a very similar way to what it would look like in WhatsApp. There is a downside, however, and that is that no photos, stickers, or voice clips are included in the preview, at least for now.

Unfortunately, the app doesn't let you save the output as HTML - and you'll have a hard time forcing it from the browser unless you have advanced knowledge - although you can easily print a conversation by clicking Print Chat View.

Chat printing pretty much maintains the viewer formatting - if you choose to keep background images - which means you can use this trick to save chat as a PDF for a more readable backup than WhatsApp TXTs.

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