Dealing with Huge Chat Log

I want to start keeping a backup the chat lot for a long running campaign in preparation for printing it all in massive books as weird gifts for my players. I plan on clearing the log often and saving backups of new chat weekly, but I've run into as issue with starting. The chat log is currently 1,938 pages as a pdf. It's so big, I can't save it. I need ideas on how to get this MASSIVE log into a format that I can send to a printer.

Select all and copy it then save it as a word document and manually go through it to decide where to break it down into chapters then into books. You will probably want to edit and proof read it also to make it more compact and readable before turning it into a pdf.

I personally go into the campaign chat log, Cmd+A (Ctrl+A for windows) to select it all, copy it and paste it into a notepad/TextEdit style program. As long as it uses richtext you can retain the formatting from the chat log. Once done you can safely clear the campaign log and all you are left with is a small document that you can do with what you will. I currently have a 3.3mb file for over 6 months of campaign activity. As Pat says you'll probably want to go through it to remove a lot of the needless stuff before looking to produce something more readable.

Save some rainforest and don't print 1938 pages of chatlog please :)

By the time I print it it'll be more than 1938 pages. We're at level 8 in a 1-30 campaign. I'll be printing somewhere around 8-10k.

Dear God... how do you have such a huge chat log? A 1.5 year Carrion Crown campaign, played nearly every week only ran 1,700 pages or so as a PDF. Is this a Play by Post game or otherwise really heavy chatlog entry?

We're all friends in real life, and all in college. We play weekly, DnD 4e. We've played for about a year or so. The chat log gets used for OOC conversations and character testing a lot. Also, the campaign cam get RP heavy, and everyone seems more comfortable typing in character rather than speaking dialogue aloud.

You're going to have a looooooong time cleaning up the log. Roll20's log output is not very friendly. Or pretty, for that matter. It was one real disadvantage after moving from IRC chat into Roll20's chat: cleaning up an IRC log is infinitely easier than Roll20's chatlog. The Roll20 chat needs to learn the love of paragraph breaks. (And not exporting the full image of avatars. dfasdfasfda)

I would suggest auto archiving it daily ;) right now must be done manually through copy/extend and clear chat log but that should be a feature on here.

Instead of printing the whole thing, why not gift them with a thumb drive that has the pdf on it?

After each session, I just print the chat log to a PDF file (plenty of free options to do that) that is saved on my hard drive. That seemed like the best way to go, so that they are separated by session and electronic.

Josh, I've printed to PDF 1,700 page logs before. I have a pretty decent machine if you want to invite me to your campaign just to run it off for you. I don't mind letting in run for a bit. I can then throw it online for you to download as PDF

I've been working through saving it in blocks of 100 pages. It's working pretty well, and after I catch up, I'll clear the log and repeat weekly. Thanks everyone for the various advice and help.