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Change text background color in confluence editor?

Martin Heineman1

Hi,

how do i change the background color of text in a confluence page?

As this is a very default feature of text processing software, why isn't there a button in the confluence editor for this like the button to change the text color?

Is this so hard to accomplish?

Accepted answers

All comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Because it's not a common thing to want to do in a set of documentation. Remember this is a wiki, not authoring or design software - the content is vastly more important than the presentation

You can, of course, do it, just not in the basic editing function. I've used the {bgcolor} macro to do it, as well as {panel} for larger blocks of text. There's quite a few similar macros available for all sorts of formatting and highlighting. I don't know if Atlassian plan to add a quicker way to do it in the editor though.

Martin Heineman1

Thank you for this very quick answer.

If changing text color is a common thing, why shouldn't be changing the text background color a common operation?

Peter Van de Voorde

Hi Martin,

You can do this using macros like the Info, Note, Tip and Warning macro.

Or with the Adaptavist Content formatting macro's : https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.adaptavist.confluence.contentFormattingMacros

Best regards,

Peter

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

That's the thing, changing text colour is not that common. People do use it, and they do ask, but it's really not used as much as a lot of people think it is. Background colouring is even more unused, and people simply don't ask for it enough to make it worth implementing.

I've also found good reasons not to use coloured text (and background text is worse). For reading, a single colour is a lot easier to scan than changing ones. Coloured text should be used sparingly, and then the mistake that most people using colour (especially with background colour) is that they fail to consider contrast - all text should be high contrast, which really does rule out most combinations. And coloured and backgrounded text are a pain in the neck for some dyslexics, and people with vision issues.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Yes, sorry, I said the {bgcolor} macro before, but didn't point at it, and I shold have. It's in the Adaptavist stuff as Peter says.

(I should say I work for Adaptavist for the sake of openness, but it was written a long time before I started there...)

Alex Feldman

I'd like to decide for myself whether I want to change background color or not. I don't need atlassian making that choice for me. I can't imagine how adding this option would take a long time, and for the people that do want it this would be very helpful.

unknown

In OnDemand, there's a {status} macro which allows you to highlight a single word or very short phrase in a coloured lozenge. I see people use it for Red-Amber-Green status a lot.

If you're not using OnDemand, you can also define a highlight as a class in the global or space-level stylesheets, such as this

.highlight { bgcolor:yellow; }

Then you use the source editor to add the class to a paragraph, li or span tag.

&lt;p class="highlight"&gt;Whole paragraph highlighted. &lt;/p&gt;.  
&lt;p&gt;Or just &lt;span class="highlight"&gt;highlight&lt;/span&gt; one word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;

It's a bit long-winded but it works. (Source editor isn't available in OnDemand).

Jeremiah Burley3

This is the solution that worked for me - Thanks! I did need to modify your CCS a bit. Work in latest versions of IE and Chrome. .highlightYellow { background-color: yellow; }

Colin Kemp

Found a "cheat" which works well for me for basic text highlighting (mid sentence even).

Select the text you want to highlight with your mouse while viewing a page (note: not while you are editing the page)
Wait a couple seconds, a pop-up will appear offering an "Inline Comment"
Type in brief comment and hit enter.
The text which was selected will now be highlighted for users, and if they click that text they will see your comment

This is supposed to be for "review" purposes, but it works perfectly for getting text quickly highlighted.

Limitation: Sadly this doesn't work in {code} or {noformat} blocks, but does work in {panel}

花田匡史

I also noticed "Inline Comment" function works well for text highlight. This "cheat" is best solution for me.

And I voted for this issue:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-27894

Corey McGinnie

I just tested this solution in Confluence a few moments ago to highlight individual words:

Select desired text to Highlight.
In Editor choose Insert (+ icon) > "{ } Markup"
Change Type in "Insert" dropdown to "Markdown"

Copy and paste the following into the editor as a template for your highlighting:

<span style="background-color: #ffff00;">Highlighted Text</span>

<span style="background-color: yellow;">Highlighted Text</span>

Example:

The above technique works well for highlighting pre-existing text. If you need to add a blank, non-highlighted space to remove the highlighting and continue typing, repeat steps 1-3 above and insert the following:

<span style="background-color: white;">&nbsp;</span>

Maksym Kovalenko

While this works, this solution is stupid. While I may use this solution, but I shouldn't be forced to do it.

Company that claims that setting text background color should be as inconvenient as possible, builds certain reputation with me and community in general.

Honestly, at this point I have very low expectations from Atlassian.

Dale_vqddmk

I'd like to see background colour as a formatting option. Seems crazy the workaround I had to go to, without even achieving what originally seemed so simple with other editors.

Samuel Egger_mf6psx

Is there any voting portal for features? We also need background highlighting. There often are some really important sections in protocols for example that need to be highlighted.

T. David Wong

Although super clumsy, but this method works for me. Thanks!

AnnWorley

@Samuel Egger We have public-facing feature requests customers can vote on. Please do vote for this suggestion ticket I created based on this thread.

As a user I would like to change the background color of all or parts of a page

You may also comment to emphasize your use case. Voting or commenting adds you to notifications so you will know when there is progress.

Angela_qpwfr9

The Info, Note, Tip and Warning macros place the text in a box with a header. This is not a solution for the request. People on this thread are asking for the ability to highlight a word or phrase.

I just tried using the Note macro in the documentation I'm working on. I had to undo the change because the Note box was ridiculous for the small amount of text I wanted to highlight in a paragraph.

Add me to the list of people who would really love to be able to highlight text in Confluence.

Tobias Witt

Welcome to Atlassian. It simply *wont* happen.

Phil Regier

If your site has HTML editing enabled (won't work on a new page; save and edit first),

1. Use the regular text color icon to designate what will become your background colors

2. Edit HTML (the "<>" icon in the upper right) and search/replace to change

style="color:

style="background-color:

3. Click "Apply" and save.

You can apply this selectively if you can read your HTML well enough, and/or you can reverse the substitution to get the toolbar button to work again, and/or you can change the text color _after_ moving the first color to the background to do color-on-color text.

Not as good as a real background color option (which we won't get), but more efficient than editing HTML/markup for every single instance of color; this way you can do all at once in bulk. Just don't do anything so extravagant you can't fix the HTML if you mess something up, and be prepared to fix the resulting <span>s if you find the colors bleeding between lines or list entries.

Shawn in Van

With all due respect Ann,

We are often asking, voting, and begging for improvements. Some or many of our requests are for the most basic of features that one should expect as standard in a 2018 editor.

Basic highlighting is one of those very basic features. This has been requested for many years. Looking at the vote link As a user I would like to change the background color of all or parts of a page - gives an entirely false impression that only 48 Confluence editors want it and it's only a recent request from about a year ago.

It's not just that... I see or experience many other issues, limitations, or bugs that are *many* years old. I can site hundreds of examples from the above page (like CONFSERVER-28579).

It leads me (or us) to ask, "What exactly do Atlassian sw engineers do?" - I'd laugh but seriously, I have dozen of issues that haven't been solved in years. You're actually worse than Google for resolving product issues. In fact, in my last job, I successfully argued against buying Atlassian Confluence. In my current job, I inherited a very large Confluence (SAAS) project. Unless I see a change in attitude or a reasonable explanation on the appearance that Atlassian doesn't actually care, I will replace you... if I ever find a suitable replacement.

That's all, rant over.

Deborah Chandran

I've found the inline span method is good for changing the font within a paragraph:

To change the font on the entire page:

1. add the CSS macro (from the '+' menu, or type '{css' and select the CSS macro

2. Inside the CSS macro, add the commands to change the font type, eg. the following will change the type of the font for the whole page to Times.

#content {font-family: Times;}

Several fonts are generally available to all browsers, for a fuller list, go here:

https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_websafe_fonts.asp

Maksym Kovalenko

The point is not in finding workaround, but making it convenient, untuitive, and easy.

Imagine that you'd need to look for workaround for background color in MS Word, MS Excel, Google Docs, Google Sheets, OpenOffice Writer, and any other editor.

Confluence editor is the only exception and in a stupid, inexplicable way.

Paul Thomas_pwuslf

@Maksym Kovalenko I so agree with you. I just need a button that can do this.

Deborah Chandran

I agree too. People are using wiki in ways beyond which it was originally intended.

There is an elegance to having the formatting defined independently from the content. And, it makes it simple to change the appearance by having that kind of control. That isn't a Confluence element, that is the heart and soul of the HTML and CSS design. Confluence is supporting that.

However, HTML also gives us a lot of power in manipulating bits and pieces, and many of these are not supported in the confluence interface. The lack of support for basic elements wastes a lot of time, as one person after another, not just admins, has to discover how to do things that are standard features in systems since the 1990s.

Until Confluence comes to understand that their community of users has bigger demands, I've decided to share the solutions that I have found, hoping that others will too, so people don't have to waste as much time as i have searching for solutions.

I would love to see a system that gives me menu controls of so much more, for example to set standard properties like background colors, to really given Confluence the potential that it has. It's an interesting tool.

Anders_ekkrtx

<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">
var element = document.getElementById('main-content');
element.style.backgroundColor = "#33CCCC";
</SCRIPT>

insert html

John Kalla

This worked for me! I wish the markup didn't disappear after saving, however. You can't re-edit; you have to re-enter the entire markup every time you want to change it.

Matt Kernes

Yeah, I'm with Shawn here. As the person responsible for all dev-level services and tech we use for our projects and internal company organization, I'm not convinced the money we spend every month is really worth the service and support we get. It took an army of customers to prove to Atlassian there was a memory leak that crashed browsers in JIRA, and in doing so we found that Atlassian doesn't even test their software properly across platform and browser combinations. This followed by a suggestion from Atlassian to either stop using Linux (WTF?) or use a different browser - one that was also affected by the problem.

For a company worth around $10B, this is pretty awful. A company worth so much which other companies rely on so closely shouldn't be so cheap on the Dev/QA resources. While it isn't my place to tell a company what to do with their time and money, it is my decision that will sway if said company will receive money from my company. There are certainly other options out there for far less green.

As a developer, I know that you generally do get what you pay for with software. Though, there are exceptions to the rule. There must be equal value, and the long laundry list of year-old bugs that have not been solved, on its own, is highly disconcerting.

The ability to highlight is already a long wait, even for just an answer on whether it will or won't happen. Posts in this thread alone are over 4 years old. Add to that the fact that this "Vote" page to find out if people even want the feature came over 3 years after this thread was even created shows how little Atlassian cares about our opinions.

My rant is not over; it's on pause.

Aly

Hello Atlassian - Are you out there listening? I know I have. Every time someone posts more on this thread, it just infuriates me more.

Being in product management and development it blows my mind that you have customers that have been requesting a simple enhancement for four (4) plus years and only response has been trust me you're asking for it but you really don't want it.

I have read and tried a dozen plus hacks that users have suggested to get around what should just be an icon on the tool pallet. Changing the background color in a documentation tool shouldn't be a multi-click process with Javascript or CSS that requires a cheatsheet to remember. Using your product should NOT be some damn difficult!

Apparently the attitude of Nik, the community champion back in 2014, is how Atlassian approach users' feedback. It frustrates me to no end that Nik stated changing text colour is not that common. People do use it, and they do ask, but it's really not used as much as a lot of people think it is. How the hell can he quantify that? There are numerous people here requesting this enhancement. That means there are at least 10 more people out there wanting this feature for each person that has taken the time to provide feedback. The thing is, if you don't listen to your users, then your users will stop talking to you. The most valuable thing for improving the product is listening to your users. Product Management 101.

Matt Kernes

They will never add it. They can EASILY add it. I, too, and in product management and development. Anyone in my team could add text highlighting in 20 minutes to a WYSIWYG editor. Some, quicker.

Atlassian isn't going to add it because it would compete with their affiliates' plugin sales. I don't need proof to know this is a fact.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211827/text-highlighter-for-confluence?hosting=server&tab=overview

We need to pay $1/user for highlighting? No thanks. And it's not even available on cloud. There's so many obvious ways here that cloud users are getting screwed. Atlassian doesn't seem to care at all.

It's pretty disheartening that Atlassian has decided it's profits before quality. There should be a mass exodus from Atlassian's ecosystem. I know that in December I'm going to start my entire company's migration to alternatives. And that's what happens when the Atlassian ignores the leads and managers of the tech teams.

Money, money, money! Hubba, hubba, hubba! Who do you trust?

Rahav

+1 for mass exodus, I've hinted that I'll do it in the past elsewhere on this thread and I'm starting it this holiday season. Its a less busy time of the year baked-in with celebrating our release from Atlassian abuse of its users.

It is just impossible to work anymore with this suite and there is no reason to get stuck anymore either.

Liam Q

@Rahav Did you have an alternative in mind? My company is looking for a documentation management system and Confluence is being seriously considered but if they can't get this right I'd like to keep looking around.

Aly

I have opened a ticket up with Atlassian on this issue. Please vote it up to make sure that this feature gets the attention that it deserves.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-64708

Thanks,

John

Andrew Kaufman_j2gtps

So far the only "answer" from Atlassian on this is "We think you don't need that feature so many people have clearly expressed that they need.". You don't get to tell customers what they need. It's been four+ years. Can you please implement this so we don't have to keep trying all of these half-baked hacks to fake our way through it?

Paul Thomas_pwuslf

I just got sent 2 badges via email from Atlassian.

They seem more interested in developing stupid badges than actually giving me a basic useful function in their tool.

Matt Kernes

Well, of course. They removed background color/highlighting so they could make a paid plugin (or allow their associated developers to make a plugin).

Atlassian is lost at sea and they're on borrowed time.

Jonathan Creech_jgoer8

Checking in on this thread, looks like Atlassian has decided to kill this idea completely for 12 months.

See: CONFSERVER-54178 where this was documented as a enhancement request and then squashed late December 2018. Too bad too.

Teodor Dutchevici

Just wow!

Aly

This is absolutely pathetic. Shame on you Atlassian! Your user base has been requesting a simple feature for four years now. A feature that would make your "customers" user experience a little nicer.

The "Accepted answer" to this Question is utter BS.

Darren Weiner

This is a big 'miss' when it comes to the product team. Chances are there is a stubborn key developer or architect that has some beef with this feature or what it represents. I too, miss html 1.0...especially the <blink> tag...but it's not coming back (is it? Please let me know if it is!).

Listen to your customers. This is a few lines of code.

Patrick O_Connell

Hello all,

At work, we have neither the CSS macro nor (I'm told) the most recent version of Confluence. Others have mentioned the panel macro, and I have successfully used it to obtain colored background on text.

Unless you do want a title and (and a background color for that, if applicable), the only parameter for which you need to specify anything is Background Color.

Then you put what text you want into the box that appears when you close the macro dialog.

It's also worth noting that that text can be any of your paragraph styles, and that you can apply a color to the text. You're limited to what's in the dropdown, but it's a decent assortment.

Any web RGB color for the background, the dropdown colors for the text—if, like me, you don't have the CSS macro, you have at least that to personalize (corporatize? :-) ) things a bit.

A Raadls

Ridiculous oversight. Confluence is not really a "wiki" by any means, are we still in 2008? It is being marketed, and used, as a massively configurable way for teams to use graphic and color-intensive pages to organize whatever they want, online. Leaving out this banally simple feature, that is one of the first things you would use with a MS Word or any other editor that would be built for consumption by teams is ridiculous.

Another example of Atlassian arrogance doing exactly what you're not supposed to with product in Agile and Lean - ignore user need. Just look at the length of this post. Agreed 100% with @darrenweiner, how much work could this be to create, and who doesn't want to?

There are numerous other issues with the new template, chiefly the "cmd + shift + J" to bring in Jira issues in a keystroke is gone, really slows the flow of using Confluence, and there was no reason to kill that off if they had any sense of power users...

Matt Kernes

It's not an oversight. They do it on purpose to sell plugins. Everything they've taken out or refused to put in is purely to sell plugins. Atlassian is SUPER greedy.

Patrick O_Connell

@A Raadls , I'm no huge fan of Atlassian, but that seems like some deep-seated cynicism.

@Matt Kernes , I don't disagree; it's just that your scope is too narrow. I'm sure that add-on developers are happy to have the opportunity to add to the functionality of Confluence, but the downside is the poor saps who have to pay for the add-ons. Or can't, or whose companies won't.

Let's start a rumour that Atlassian is a division of EA. Certainly there's a lot of overlap in their business models. :-)

Matt Kernes

Well, since Atlassian will NEVER admit it, and will never give us something as trivial as this (since paid plugins exist now), it's a moot point. This is why our company is moving away from Atlassian.

Peter Andersen

Instead or Markdown and direct HTML editing, you can also add a User Macro (instead of buying one). It's clumsy but better than nothing:

## Macro title: Text Highlight
## Macro has a body: Y
## Body processing: Rendered
## Output: text background color set to yellow
##
## @noparams
<span style="background-color: yellow">$body</span>

I 100% agree that the editor should support this directly to avoid hacks like this!

Paul Thomas_pwuslf

Useful answer. Thanks.

Sarah Ahmed

Is there any way to reconsider opening this research back up? I had to use the work-a-round to highlight some words and the only thing that helped me is that I work in software engineering, so doing the macro is possible.. To the average user in Confluence at my company, this would not be feasible for them to use. There would be tons of questions and confusion.

unknown

Since the editor does not support highlighting, but it does support other features that no one uses like subscript, I hijacked the subscript feature to perform highlighting instead. All you have to do is go to "Space Tools" > "Look and Feel" > "Stylesheet", and add the following. Then anything that you set as subscript will instead be highlighted yellow.

Please note that this is for Confluence Server and you must have the Space Admin permission to view and edit the stylesheet.

Liam H

Hi Jeff, is this for Confluence Server? I've checked my Confluence Cloud instance and can't find the "Stylesheet" settings page. Sounds like a great workaround but may not be possible on ConfCloud unless I'm missing something.

unknown

Yes, this applies only to Confluence Server. I have updated my original post with this detail. Thanks for pointing this out.

Harold Byun

I think more broadly you should be looking at Confluence as a means to disseminate and share information. Given that many workers today are dealing with too much information, a simple method to highlight key points and information across teams would probably be valuable.

On the other hand, if you simply want to continue to think of your product in a vacuum that should only be used the way the creator intended it to be used, you're right. There is no thinkable scenario where highlighting should ever be needed or used.

+1 for implementing the above feature and making it easy to implement.

Sarah Ahmed

Formatting in HTML was the only way I could do it.

There is an issue overall with formatting in confluence.

I understand Confluence was created to share knowledge and that is fantastic. The issue stems from the formatting limitations Confluence has and it making it difficult to really plan out a document that is easy to read and edit.

As a customer, I want to be able to format document content like a learning guide. Sometime using tabs, highlight words, and other really easy formatting options. The way Confluence is designed makes that a little difficult. One has to almost be a Developer to use some of the add-on macros available. I really think Atlassian should take a step back, look at how their customers are using the tool (just like Slack did) and maybe redesign a few things to make it easier for the end user.

One easy way is to look at these forums and see that a lot of folks are always asking about highlighting words without having to configure it in HTML or something similar. Give the customer what they need or provide a better solution. Who cares what it was originally designed for. Technology is changing everyday, we must all learn, grow, and listen to our customers/clients/Vendors when that state what they want to see change.

Note: I've created some pretty great content using add-ons that make the page beautiful to look at, but editing it is a pain. No one outside my department is able to utilize Confluence in the same way because the end user is not a developer and has no idea how to use HTML macros. Sales, accounting, Legal, all they want is something easy to use and be able to see it on the page as it would look.. not the add-on macros..(i.e. HTML language. )

pkclsoft

Done. Thanks for creating the issue. It's a shame it's getting so little attention.

Paul Thomas_pwuslf

I've been wanting this basic functionality for years now.

This is basic stuff.

I retire from my company in a month and will no longer use Confluence. It's a shame that this wasn't implemented before I left.

And it also proves that all those people who said that Atlassian doesn't really care about user feedback were correct. That's a shame. Adios.

martin_l8gzsw

I would also really like this feature.
I am currently working on documenting our pipeline and I need areas to stand out.
Have your UX designers done any research on the matter? If so, what are the numbers of the people who you interviewed?

Phil Regier

Since it doesn't get pointed out often, and even though Sisyphean is never going to do anything about it, I'll observe that if one had to choose between foreground coloring and background coloring, background is much more useful than foreground. The OP pointed this out all those years ago. Few colors are readable over white backgrounds without darkening them to the point where they look black or at least dark brown; by contrast (no pun intended), most colors have a luminance value on which, when used as a background, black text is 100% readable while those backgrounds all retain their distinctiveness to somebody who can see the entire color wheel. The fact that the entire color wheel is _not_ actually available for all viewers makes it all that much more important to offer background colors for accessibility's sake. Not that the vendor cares about accessibility one iota.

David Middleton_upqhs1

Nice one. Saves me paying for a plugin.

Thanks Peter.

S Hoover

There are 202 votes on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-27894, 211 votes on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-54178, and 99 votes on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-64708 . Multiple users have been asking for this for 7.5 years.

dmtavt

Thank you Phil, I just wrote a comment in 2020 in frustration saying exactly the same thing. Yours is much better worded though.