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Tell HN: Perplexity Has Unspecified Character Limits for Session Export

eth0up Sunday, January 04, 2026

Hello all,

I discovered, the hard way, that exporting Perplexity sessions to PDF results in substantial content loss when the page is ~90 pages.

After opening a ticket on the matter, a brief dialogue with a rep proved unhelpful and confusing. It was stated that the Export as PDF feature only exports individual "threads", and that to export an entire session, each so-called thread must be individually selected and exported. This is simply wrong.

In practice, there is no method to select threads through the Top-Right/ 3-dot menu/Export as PDF option. Testing this with various sessions from 1 to 170 page exports showed no indication that threads were relevant.

Exports under 90 pages tend* to retain all content, while a 93-page didn't, but a 95 and 170 page export did. This indicates that the character limit (if that's the cause) is variable, as 170 pages is almost guaranteed to contain more characters than 90.

The fundamental point here, whatever the cause, is that data loss is inevitable under the present UI with its absence of documentation, notices etc.

*I observed changes after submitting the ticket and modifications have already been made. The situation was worse before, and now less worse, but still applies.

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