Message to PDF exports one iMessage or SMS conversation out of your Mac's chat.db and into a PDF that looks like Messages: your bubbles blue on the right, theirs gray on the left, photos inline, tapbacks, replies, edit history, read receipts.
Apple ships no export. The good open source exporters emit HTML or plain text, which is right for search and archival and wrong for a document you can print, file, or hand to someone. Message to PDF lays out the other thing: one conversation, paginated, looking about like it looked, so a thread worth keeping can outlive the phone.
Everything happens on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.
Message to PDF is a Mac app, and it's free software (GPL-3.0). Two ways to run it:
- Buy the build. A signed, notarized, universal app that opens with a double-click — one-time $29, no subscription, 14-day refund. It's the same program you can build below; paying skips the toolchain and supports the work. → [website — link at launch]
- Build it yourself. It's all here. Instructions below.
This is a Cargo workspace: a shared engine (msg2pdf-core), a command-line tool (msg2pdf), and the desktop app (Message to PDF, built with Tauri). You need macOS, a Rust toolchain, and — for the app — pnpm. Photo conversion shells out to /usr/bin/sips, already on every Mac; nothing else to install.
cd apps/desktop
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev # build and run against a synthetic fixture (no real data, no permissions needed)A debug run reads a seeded fixture database, so you can try the whole UI without touching your own messages. Point it at a real database with MSG2PDF_DB=/path/to/chat.db pnpm tauri dev. A release build (pnpm tauri build) reads ~/Library/Messages/chat.db and is what the distributed app is made from; it signs with the maintainer's Apple Developer ID, so building your own distributable means supplying your own identity (or just running tauri dev).
On first launch a release build asks for Full Disk Access — macOS keeps chat.db private, and this is the switch that lets Message to PDF read it, locally. The app walks you through it.
cargo build --release
./target/release/msg2pdf # pick from a list
./target/release/msg2pdf --contact +15555550123 # or name one
./target/release/msg2pdf --contact [email protected] --out ~/DesktopThe CLI reads chat.db directly, so grant Full Disk Access to whichever terminal you run it from (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access → add Terminal, iTerm, or your editor). With no --contact it opens a fuzzy picker over every 1:1 chat, newest first. --db reads a chat.db from elsewhere (a backup, say); --out picks the output directory.
- Bubbles in Messages' proportions: 72% of the content width at most, 12pt corners, iMessage blue for you and system gray for them, tight within a run and looser when the speaker changes.
- Date separators when an hour goes by or the calendar day turns over.
- Photos inline, one large or tiled: two across, three across, 2x2 for four, three across past that.
- Other attachments as a chip with filename and size. Files iCloud has evicted from disk are marked missing rather than dropped quietly.
- Tapbacks on the bubble they were actually aimed at, including one aimed at the photo half of a photo-plus-text message.
- Replies carrying a snippet of whatever was replied to.
- Edits: every earlier version, dated, beneath the final text. Unsent messages hold their place as markers.
- Receipts on the last message of each of your runs, the way Messages does it, with Read winning over Delivered when both exist.
- Color emoji from Twemoji PNGs, since the embedded text font has no color glyphs.
The engine lives in msg2pdf-core; the CLI and the app are thin shells over it.
load.rs: openschat.dbread-only and resolves the conversation. A 1:1 chat is achatrow with exactly one joined handle, so group chats fall out of the query; when a handle exists but only inside group chats, it says that instead of reporting nothing found. It also tells "protected" (needs Full Disk Access) apart from "not there," which drives the app's onboarding.contacts.rs: reads the macOS AddressBook to turn handles into names. Numbers key on digits alone with both US forms inserted, so+1 (555) 555-0123and5555550123land on the same person. No readable AddressBook just means handles stay raw.model.rs: streams messages throughimessage-database, then pulls tapbacks out and buckets them by target GUID and component index. A message carrying both a photo and text becomes two bubbles, photo first, and that component index is what routes each reaction to the right one.assets.rs: converts each photo to a JPEG capped at 1200px withsips, then reads the EXIF orientation and rotates the pixels itself before dropping the tag. PDF has no orientation flag, so a portrait photo that merely claims to be upright would otherwise arrive on its side. Staging is a temp directory removed on drop.emoji.rs/font.rs: DejaVu Sans and DejaVu Sans Bold are compiled into the binary with advance widths read from the TTF, so a line can be measured before it is drawn; color emoji draw as Twemoji images inline, each distinct glyph embedded once.pdf.rs: the layout engine. US Letter, 36pt margins, a single cursor walking down the page. Each bubble is measured whole — wrapped text, photo block, reply header, reactions, receipt — then starts a new page when all of it will not clear the bottom margin.
The app reports progress through a sink the engine calls as it works, and runs the whole export off the UI thread so a large conversation never freezes the window.
crates/
msg2pdf-core/ the engine (load, contacts, model, assets, pdf, …)
msg2pdf-cli/ the `msg2pdf` command-line tool
msg2pdf-fixture/ a synthetic chat.db for tests and dev (no real data, ever)
apps/desktop/ the Message to PDF app — Tauri (Rust) + React/Vite/Tailwind
Internal crate and binary names stay msg2pdf; the product is Message to PDF.
1:1 conversations only; group chats are refused at the door. macOS only by construction, since the paths, the AddressBook schema, and sips all belong to Apple. Photos embed, while video and audio and documents are listed but not rendered. The conversation is assembled in memory before a byte is written, which is comfortable for years of one thread and would not be for a decade of a busy one.
Nothing leaves the machine: no network calls, no telemetry, and chat.db is opened read-only. Exports are private by definition, so the repo refuses to track *.pdf and *.html at the root.
GPL-3.0-or-later. Message to PDF is built on two libraries by ReagentX, both GPL, that do the hard work of reading Apple's data: imessage-database (the Messages schema) and crabstep (the typedstream blobs Apple stores message bodies in). Because they are GPL, Message to PDF is too — copyleft all the way down. DejaVu Sans is bundled under its own permissive license. The full license text is in LICENSE.