Legal Text Collector¶
Text messages made printable
Text Collector turns your messages into court-friendly PDF files.
Install Text Collector for Android or see the walkthrough
Filter by date |
Preview the PDF |
Share with your attorney |
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Walkthrough¶
Install the app
Legal Text Collector is available on Google Play.
No collections yet
Nothing to see yet. Start by tapping the “New collection” button.
Ready to start a collection
A “collection” is just a copy of your messages. For now, let’s collect all your messages.
Tap “Collect messages”
Accept permissions
Phones running recent Android versions will ask you if you want Text Collector to access your messages and contacts.
The message is a bit confusing because it asks if you want to allow Text Collector to read and send messages.
Text Collector does not send messages. See the privacy policy for more info.
Collection now in progress
Collecting all your messages can take a few minutes, so, in the meantime, let’s start a smaller collection that’s restricted to recent messages.
Press “New collection”
Date filter the collection
Let’s collect just messages since April 2017.
Tap the “Starting” date field
Pick start date
Pick the first day of the month
Tap “OK”
Look at what the filters will do
We don’t need an end date; this collects messages on or after the first of the month. Unless we received messages from the future, that will work for “since April.”
Tap “Collect messages”
Wait for it…
This finishes quicker. When it does, the message changes from “in progress” to the number of messages it collected.
Tap the finished collection
Preview the PDF files
The first page shows a summary of what we collected.
Pinching zooms in and out.
Tap “Next” to navigate the messages
Find a person
You can jump straight to conversations with particular people.
Tap “Find”
Scroll through people
When you share the collection, each of these becomes a separate document.
Bare phone numbers at the bottom are for numbers that don’t have an entry in your address book.
Tap Xena
Share the collection
When you’re happy with the results, export the collection by using Android’s sharing feature.
Remember you can share with yourself.
Tap “Share”
Pick all or just one
After tapping “Share,” you can choose to export just the conversation you’re viewing, or the whole collection.
Tap “Continue”
Unlock sharing
At this point, you need to purchase the sharing feature. One purchase lets you share as many collections as you like.
Tap “Continue”
Pick how to share
After you finish buying the share feature, Android pops up a chooser where you can pick how you want to share.
This collection is small enough that email works fine. For larger collections, Dropbox or Google Drive work better.
Tap “Gmail”
Send it
Now you’re in the Gmail app with your messages attached to a draft email. Send it to yourself so you can open it on an ordinary computer.
Open it
Text Collector puts your messages in a zip file. When unzipped, you can see each conversation as a PDF.
End of walkthrough¶
Use Text Collector for ediscovery in your lawsuit or if you just want to print your text messages.
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Share printable messages by email, Dropbox, or any other file sharing app. |
Preview the results for free. Share as many text message collections as you like for a small in-app purchase.