How to have the footer text in Knowledge base left aligned?

[Rathna Subramanian]

Hi, 

When I have a footer in Knowledge base items for Jira service management, the text is center aligned. How to make this left aligned and also how to have different font size from the content.

Thanks

[Shashank Dubey · Accepted solution]

In Jira Service Management Cloud, the Knowledge Base footer (under Project settings → Knowledge base → Customize → Footer) uses a limited rich-text editor and inherits most of its styling from the help center theme. By default, the footer content is center-aligned and doesn’t provide native controls for custom alignment or font sizing.

So What you can do is :
1️⃣ Text Alignment There’s currently no built-in option to change the footer alignment to left. The alignment is controlled by the help center layout and cannot be overridden through the standard editor.
2️⃣ Font Size Similarly, custom font sizing isn’t supported directly in the footer editor. It follows the help center’s default typography settings.
Possible Workarounds:
Custom Help Center (JSM Premium/Enterprise)

If you're on a Premium or Enterprise plan, you can customize the help center theme using custom CSS. That would allow you to:
Force text-align: left;
Set a custom font-size
HTML Styling (Limited Support)
In some cases, basic inline HTML like <div style="text-align:left; font-size:14px;"> may work — but this is not officially supported and may be stripped out depending on your configuration.

But ,If you're on the Standard plan, styling options are unfortunately limited to what the theme provides.

[Rathna Subramanian]

Hi Shasank, Thank you for the answer. We are having Premium plan, but I do not see rich text editor, but a simple text box for Header and Footer. I also do not want to go HTML inline formatting as it is not supported.

[Shashank Dubey]

Thanks for clarifying@Rathna Subramanian

On Jira Service Management Premium (Cloud), the Header and Footer fields in Project settings → Channels & self-service → Help center → Customize are intentionally plain text only. Atlassian removed rich-text support there, and those sections inherit the global Help Center styling.

So:

There’s no built-in way to change alignment (it defaults to centered in the layout).

There’s no supported way to change font size.

Inline HTML/CSS is not officially supported and may be sanitized.

Even on Premium, you cannot inject custom CSS into the Help Center (that’s not currently available on Cloud).

In short, this is a platform limitation rather than a configuration issue.

Still the options which you can opt:

 Use concise text only and rely on default styling (most common approach).

Move styled content into a Knowledge Base article and link to it from the footer.

Raise a feature request in Atlassian’s public issue tracker (JAC) — several requests already exist for enhanced Help Center customization.

[Rathna Subramanian]

Hi @Shashank Dubey

Going for a seperate article and linking in the footer was our Plan B solution. Looks like we have to go for that. Thank you for your help.

[Christos Markoulatos -Relational-]

Hi @Rathna Subramanian Welcome

Juat edit the KB page select the text u want and align it left

[Rathna Subramanian]

Hi Chris, Thank you for the answer. I am looking for the footer and general content.