WACZ to PDF

I was recently working with a journalist who wanted the articles they had written archived from the newspaper’s website. I gave them a WACZ file (created with Browsertrix), and they were like: Hey nice! But could I get the articles as PDFs? A WACZ is a good container for a web crawl. It plays back easily in open-source replay software like Browsertrix and ReplayWebPage. But it’s not always the most convenient format for a non-archivist who wants to read, annotate, print or file away a set of their articles. I’ve been trying to put my Claude access to work while it lasts. So I worked with Claude to write a small CLI utility, wacz-pdf, that extracts all (or a subset) of the pages from a WACZ and writes them out as PDF files, one per page. The pages come from the crawler’s own page list (pages/pages.jsonl), falling back to the CDX index for archives that don’t have one. Each page is then handled according to what it is. HTML gets replayed through wabac.js, Webrecorder’s own replay…