Export space to PDF misses attachments

[Boris Vinarsky]

I export Confluence space to PDF. Pages look OK. There are no attachments.

Links to attachments look like: 

http://<confluence-adress>/download/attachments/<some- number>/<attachment-file-name>?version=1&modificationDate=1673907915000&api=v2

I expect export to be independent from the confluence installation. 

How can I include attachments to PDF export?

I am aware that HTML export contains attachments. It has own issues I do not want to mix up to this question. 

[Max Foerster - K15t · Accepted solution]

Hi @Boris Vinarsky

What kind of attachments is missing? Did you come across the documentation about exporting content in Confluence?

• Export Content to Word, PDF, HTML and XML

The following content is included in space exports.

	PDF export	XML export	HTML export
Pages	Yes	Yes	Yes
Blogs	No	Yes	No
Comments	No	Optional	Optional
Attachments	Images only	Yes	Yes
Unpublished changes	No	Yes	No
Page numbers	Optional	N/A	N/A
Restricted pages and blog posts	Only those you can view	Yes, they remain restricted	Only those you can view

The only supported attachments in PDF exports are images that make sense thinking about the PDF file format. So your expectation of being independent of a Confluence installation could be challenging to meet.

Best, Max

[Boris Vinarsky]

Hi Max,

Thank you for the info. It is helpful for understanding how export works.

Note that HTML export takes all attachments. PDF export should do it too. It should create attachments directory and put attachments there like HTML export does. Instead of hyperlinks to Confluence it can include hyperlinks to these files.

To verify that it is possible I printed HTML page to PDF and opened results with acroread. The page had links to pdf, ppt (powerpoint), and pptx (latest powerpoint). All worked fine. One of the hyperlinks looks like this: file:///user/test/MacDonald/MAC/attachments/8067925/80674928.pdf

My users add all kinds of attachments. I counted 12 types of attachments in the spaces I have to export. Unfortunately, HTML export does sloppy job exporting tables. At this point I am not clear what to do.

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Hmm, okay. So the native PDF export doesn't get the job done, and the HTML export is sloppy. I briefly chatted with my colleague from the teams responsible for our exporter solutions at K15t about your use case. Here's what @Tom Rough said:

Hey good morning, yeah both apps can export the complete contents of the space and can also embed attachments in their respective generated exports.

So I would recommend you start a free trial for either Scroll PDF Exporter or Scroll HTML Exporter on the Atlassian Marketplace and try them out to see if they meet your requirements. They should enable you to solve the attachment issue AND create beautiful reports! :)

If you have any further questions, you can reach out to help@k15t.com or ping us here in the community. I hope that I could already help you with this.

Best, Max

[Boris Vinarsky]

Hi Max,
Thank you for helpful advice. We will try these export tools. Now when PDF export is clear I want to explain why I call HTML export sloppy. Exported tables come out as a blob in some cases. The problem is that cells come out borderless. Consider that cell content may have multiple rows, there is no way to distinguish between rows of content and rows of cells. Moreover, consider values which are naturally aligned like measurements with fixed precision “7.62 7.73 5.90” in the same cell, and you have multiple rows of this kind. In borderless table you have the same problem as above, only in columns. I consider missing borders in tables as a bug.
Another issue is that you can header row or column only by content. There is no gray background like in Confluence. In my test example header content was left aligned, in export it was centralized. These are issues, bot a bug like missing borders.
Note that HTML offers all the tools to recreate tables exactly like Confluence sends to the browser.
I asked our IT to open a case with Atlassian on these matters on my behalf. If it is assigned to you, I look forward to working with you.

Thank you,

Boris