Meeting Notes Template Behavior – Hidden Spacing and Formatting Issue

[Milan Berta]

There seem to be invisible spacer elements between sections (e.g., Goals → Brainstorm → Discussion Topics). Removing the extra spacing is tedious because it often changes formatting in following paragraphs, removes emojis/icons, or alters heading styles.

Can someone confirm whether these hidden spacing/decorator elements are expected behavior, or if there's a recommended way to clean up the layout without affecting formatting? Thanks.

[Dan Breyen]

Hi @Milan Berta I see similar behavior in my instance.  Personally I would agree that the extra spacing isn't wanted.  I'm going to loop Atlassian Support in on this issue and have them weigh in on the formatting of the template.

[Rob Hean]

@Milan Berta  - That behavior appears to be universal anywhere you have a line with Header font, not just on that particular template (see this loom), or even JUST with an emoji (see image below).

Also the gap appears to change based on the size of the header

So it appears to be related to the header under the line, and the size of the gap appears to match the height of that header (I didn't measure it though...).

Personally this kinda makes sense since a Header is typically used to break up space, so this extra whitespace fits that use.

Question for you - How much does it matter to remove the few extra spacers this inserts?  e.g. how much is it disrupting the your teams ability to use confluence / consume content / etc or is it just a visual annoyance?

Asking as this appears to be consistent across all pages (as long as there's a Header on the next line). I'm unaware of any setting that controls this, so a change would likely have to be universal for everyone using Confluence. May just be easily to incorporate these as expected in documentation.

Although a question for Atlassian - was this added with an explicit requirement, or is this some side effect of using Headers?

[Milan Berta]

The Date, the Goal and the Action items sections do not have extra spaces.

It is a newline actually or a multiline header, in which the Brainstorm and Discussion topics are on the second line. One can actually place the cursor to write into the line before section headers Brainstorm and Discussion topics. It is not so easy to delete this first line, thou. If cursor is placed on that empty line and Delete is pressed, the line and the following emoticon is deleted. One have to place an empty space by Spacebar and then delete it by Backspace to remove the empty line. 

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Milan Berta Possible reason they did this: they left space (paragraphs) for you to type in stuff and still be able to see the placeholder text, rather than you just overtyping the placeholder text. Once you fill in the information, you would delete the placeholder text paragraph.

If this is the case, I would think they would add a note/placeholder? explaining this.

[Milan Berta]

The Goal and Action items sections do not have extra lines. Not needed. Placeholders disappear after typing a char. But after the first use of the template, there is no need to reread the placeholders next time.