Has anyone solved printing JSM Knowledge Base articles from the customer portal?
Hi Community,
We use a Confluence Knowledge Base connected to Jira Service Management Cloud, and we would like customers to be able to print our KB articles directly from the customer portal, either to a physical printer or by selecting Save as PDF.
Currently, when a customer opens an article through the portal and uses Ctrl+P or Cmd+P, the resulting output is not formatted well. Instead of producing a clean, article-only document, the browser attempts to print the wider portal layout.
We have seen issues such as:
- Large amounts of blank space
- Misaligned or clipped content
- Tables extending beyond the printable area
- Images displaying incorrectly or disappearing
- Portal navigation, headers, and margins affecting the document
I have attached an example of the resulting print layout.
We have investigated the Confluence PDF stylesheet, but that appears to control PDFs generated through the Confluence export process rather than browser printing from the JSM customer portal. Adjusting browser print settings, such as scale, margins, and orientation, can help slightly, but the results are still inconsistent.
Pre-generating PDFs and attaching them to each article is also not practical for us. We have a large number of KB articles, and maintaining a separate PDF whenever the source article changes would create a significant content-management overhead.
I found the following Atlassian feature requests, but both remain unresolved and in Gathering Interest:
- JSDCLOUD-4045 – Ability to directly export a knowledge-base article to PDF or DOCX from the customer portal
- JSDCLOUD-13903 – Export/Print Knowledge Base pages from the JSM customer portal
There is also JSDCLOUD-15848, which specifically describes misaligned content and missing images when using Save as PDF from a portal article. That request was closed as a duplicate of JSDCLOUD-4045, with no known workaround documented.
Has anyone found a reliable and scalable solution for this in JSM Cloud?
In particular, I would be interested in hearing about:
- Marketplace apps that provide a print or PDF option directly to portal customers
- A Forge app or custom portal extension that creates an article-only print view
- An on-demand PDF-generation solution that always uses the latest article content
- A workaround that continues to respect JSM and Confluence customer permissions
- Any other method that avoids manually maintaining PDF attachments for every article
Ultimately, we are looking for a customer-friendly way to print the current KB article without including the surrounding portal layout.
Thanks in advance for any ideas or examples of how others have handled this.
