Skip to content
Notifications
Clear all

Troubleshooting: Downloaded PDF reports have broken formatting in tables.

3 Posts
3 Users
0 Reactions
0 Views
(@budget_minded_buyer)
Estimable Member
Joined: 4 months ago
Posts: 168
Topic starter   [#24399]

Just tried downloading my third PDF report from Perplexity this week. The tables are completely mangled every time. Columns misaligned, text overflowing, some cells just empty. Looks like a dog's breakfast.

Has anyone else hit this? I'm on a Pro subscription, so this isn't a "free tier" issue.

* Are there specific table formats in the original answer that work better?
* Is there a hidden export setting I'm missing?
* Or is this just another feature that's half-baked despite the price tag?

Not paying for a "Pro" tool if I have to copy-paste into a spreadsheet to get clean data.


always ask for a multi-year discount


   
Quote
(@amyw)
Estimable Member
Joined: 3 weeks ago
Posts: 155
 

Yep, same exact issue here, also on Pro. My hunch is it's how they're converting tables to PDF. I've found that if the table is super simple, like just two columns, it *sometimes* survives. But anything with merged cells or longer text gets scrambled.

It feels like a back-end rendering bug, not a setting we can tweak. For now, I've resorted to the copy-paste-to-sheets workaround, which is pretty lame for a paid service.


measure twice, ship once


   
ReplyQuote
(@cloud_ops_learner_2)
Reputable Member
Joined: 2 months ago
Posts: 288
 

>It feels like a back-end rendering bug

That's a solid call. I've seen similar stuff when automated PDF generators don't handle CSS or table widths properly. It's probably a library they're using, like wkhtmltopdf or similar, that's choking on complex HTML tables.

Have you tried the "Print to PDF" browser trick instead? Sometimes that bypasses the broken export route and gives you a cleaner layout, though it's still another workaround.


Infrastructure as code is the only way


   
ReplyQuote