Home · Guides · updated 3 September 2026

Converting a WhatsApp chat to a PDF for court

Converting a WhatsApp chat to a PDF is the easy half. WhatsApp gives you a text file, a court reads a paginated document, and getting from one to the other without quietly destroying the thing that made the record provable is the part worth reading about.

Start from the export, not from the screen

The order of work decides everything that follows. Export the conversation from the phone, keep that file untouched, hash it, and build the readable document from it. Every shortcut that skips the export — screenshots stitched together, text pasted into a word processor, a print taken from inside the app — produces a document that looks much the same and can be tested for nothing. Screenshots, and why an export is stronger sets out the difference in full.

If the export arrived as a .zip rather than a bare .txt, the WhatsApp export .zip deals with the archive itself — what is in it, and how not to damage it. This page is about the document built from it.

What a court-ready PDF has to carry

A transcript is not made useful by being neat. It is made useful by being checkable, which means the document has to say enough about itself for a stranger to test it:

• The range, stated on its face. First entry, last entry, and the number of entries between them. A reader should never have to infer what period the document covers.
• Permanent entry numbers. Every message numbered, so a passage can be put to a witness and found again by the other side in the same place.
• The hash of the source file, with the algorithm named and the commands to recompute it printed alongside — see verifying the hash.
• The particulars of the source: which device the export came from, when it was taken, and by whom. These are the same particulars Part A of the Schedule asks for.
• Attachments reconciled, in both directions: how many the transcript names, how many the archive holds, and any file that appears on one side only.
• The awkward entries left where they are. Deleted-message placeholders and media omitted lines are part of the record. A document that tidies them away is worth less, not more.
• Pagination and a cover. Page x of y, so a page cannot go missing unnoticed.

The PDF is not the record

This is the point most guidance on the subject gets wrong, and it is worth being exact about. The certificate under Section 63(4) identifies an electronic record, and it identifies it by its hash. Converting that record into a PDF produces a second, different file. The PDF is a rendering — useful, readable, the thing the court will actually look at — but the hash in the certificate does not describe it.

So both go on the file: the PDF for reading, and the native export, delivered as the court directs, so that the hash means something. An exhibit filed without the file it certifies invites exactly one question in cross-examination, and there is no good answer to it. Filing a chat exhibit covers what physically reaches the court.

Three ways this gets done, and what each costs

• Copy and paste into a word processor. Fast, and it loses everything: the document is no longer connected to the export, nothing can be recomputed, and anyone could produce the same pages by typing.
• Print the conversation from the phone. Better looking than screenshots and no stronger. It remains a rendering of a screen, with no continuity, no verifiable source file and nothing structural to examine.
• Render from the exported file. The document is produced from the record, states the hash of that record, and can be checked against it line by line. It is the only one of the three that survives a hostile reading.

What “chronological” actually means here

Rendering in order sounds like a formatting preference. It is a fidelity requirement: the sequence comes from the file, and nothing is re-ordered, grouped by sender, filtered or summarised on the way into the document. A transcript that silently reorganises the conversation is no longer a transcript of it.

The times themselves need explaining rather than merely reproducing. They come from one device, in one time zone and one locale, and they are read by people who assume all three are their own. Timestamps, order and time zones sets out what has to be stated so that the dates are not argued about later.

What to hand the court

1. The rendered exhibit, paginated and numbered, with the hash and the verification commands on it.
2. The native export itself, unmodified, on the medium the court accepts.
3. The certificate in the form of the Schedule, describing that export — see the certificate format.
4. The attachments, where the record has any, with a manifest listing each file and its own hash.
5. The same set served on the other side, so that what they receive is what the court has.

Section63 renders the exhibit from the file in your browser, hashes the export before anything else touches it, prints the verification commands on the cover, and reconciles the attachments both ways. The document it produces is a rendering of your record and says so on its face — the export is still the thing that gets certified.

---

This guide explains procedure and states the law as we understand it. It is not legal advice, and Aarohan Enterprises is not a law firm. Whether a court admits a particular record, and what weight it gives it, is for that court to decide. Have an advocate settle anything you intend to file.