Text Timeline
Turn text messages into court-ready evidence for family law.
Visit Website
July 7, 2026
How do you export your text messages to PDF?
I built TextTimeline because I needed it: during my own family-law case I had years of text messages that mattered and no sane way to get them in front of a court. Screenshots get challenged (croppable, no metadata).
5 Comments
As someone who had to print out hundreds of screenshots for a legal dispute, this is brilliant. Getting pages rejected because of 'missing context' or timestamps is a nightmare. Definitely lean into the court-ready angle
What decides this product isn't the export, it's whether the output survives a hostile lawyer trying to throw it out. You already named the real threat model: screenshots get challenged because they're croppable and stripped of metadata. So the product's job is to be verifiable by someone who assumes you faked it.
That means preserving the metadata most people never see (per-message timestamps, sender IDs, where the export came from) and giving opposing counsel a way to confirm nothing was edited after the fact. A hash of the original extract, or a short provenance note like "pulled from this iOS backup on this date, X messages, none removed", does more for admissibility than any formatting choice. The first question a judge or the other side asks is "how do we know this is complete and untouched" — build for that question and you're selling evidence, not a PDF.
Have you run a generated file past a family-law attorney or paralegal yet? They'll tell you what gets objected to, and they can be your distribution too.
good
Building it from your own family law case changes how I read this. The point about screenshots getting challenged is one of those details you only mention after living through it.
I can picture someone at 11 p.m. searching for how to turn years of text messages into something a court will actually accept. They probably aren't looking for a product yet. They're just trying not to make a costly mistake.
I'm curious if you've noticed people describing it as "the thing for court evidence" instead of "a PDF exporter" because those are two very different first impressions.
What stood out to me is that you're solving for credibility, not convenience.
Exporting messages isn't the hard part. Producing something another person can trust without questioning how it was assembled is. That's a very different problem than just turning texts into a PDF.