ASBAR-Parser

Parses Android SMS Backup and Restore .xml files to extract media and format the text messages.

Creates a "text message bubble" styled format.

Requirements

This module requires ffmpeg to be installed and available in your system's PATH. Playwright's Chromium browser must also be installed before generating PDFs.

ghostscript (gs) is optional: when available, a second <name>-compressed.pdf is also generated next to each PDF, with embedded images downsampled and re-encoded (150 dpi, medium JPEG quality) like Acrobat's "Compress PDF" action. Without it, the full-size PDF is still produced and compression is skipped with a notice.

brew install ghostscript

asbar install-browsers

If running the package directly with uv, use:

uv tool run --from asbar-parser asbar install-browsers

Usage

Run asbar in the directory that has your Android SMS Backup and Restore .xml file(s), or provide the directory path as an argument.

asbar "input/directory"