nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Introducing the New PDF Formatting Experience – Open Beta!

Kelly Sitton

Hi Confluence Community,

We’re excited to introduce the open beta of our New PDF Formatting Experience! Now, you can easily customize how your Confluence pages look when exported to PDF. No coding or technical skills are needed.

With just a few clicks, you can adjust page size, margins, fonts, headers, and more, all from your space settings. It’s never been easier to create polished, professional PDFs.

📝 What Problem Are We Solving?

Until now, customizing PDF exports in Confluence often meant dealing with code, which made it hard to get the look you wanted. With our new experience, anyone can create professional PDFs using simple settings.

🚀 What’s New?

The New PDF Formatting Experience lets you configure PDF exports from the PDF Look & Feel page in your space settings with easy-to-use settings. No CSS or HTML is needed.
You can adjust:

Page size and orientation
Margins
Font type and size
Line spacing
Headers and footers
Page numbers
Title page

🔑 How to Try It

Admins: Opt in to the beta from the PDF Look & Feel page in the space settings. Look for the message at the top of the page.
The beta is applied at the space level and can be opted out by an admin at any time.

🙏 We Need Your Feedback!

👉 Click the feedback button in the app to tell us what you think!

This is an open beta, and your feedback is important to us.
Please share:

Which customization options you use most
Anything missing or confusing in the new interface
What would make exporting PDFs from Confluence even easier

The more you share about your needs and how you use PDF exports, the better we can make this feature for you and the whole Confluence community.

Thank you for helping us build a better Confluence for everyone,
The Confluence PDF export team

Comments

Rhys Gottwald

Is them meant to replace the CSS formatting completely or work with it? What if we would like to have a different color for the Header fonts?

James O_Connor_o89ye8

This sounds awesome @Kelly Sitton, but I can't see the option in any of my spaces yet - is it a gradual roll-out?

Dirk Ronsmans

Great!

Hopefully no more need for 3rd party solutions to get a nicely formatted pdf

Lars Maehlmann

Looks great and very promising. I’d love to see an option to add an image at the top or bottom of the page. It would also be helpful to have the Confluence “Layout” macro available for the footer, so we can match official company documents that often use three or even four columns.

Will there be a way to customize how tables behave in the export?

I know I’m asking for a lot and will probably stick with Scroll PDF for now. Nevertheless, I’m really excited about these new PDF settings — this is a big step forward. Thank you for working on it.

Koloman Pfeffer

So far it works really well for us, especially because now app macros don't get completely mangled (especially draw.io), as they have before.

Setting it up was also very easily understandable, although I hope there will be a way to set a global standard in global Confluence settings, so this isn't a thing one would have to set up for every space.

Since we can add headers and footers as well as title pages, it would be a great addition, if setting those up would work with some smart values such as page title, page owner, space name, published version or date of last edit to get some metadata automatically.
This would be a major time saver for everyone who uses Confluence for quality management documentation, that needs to be exported for external audits.

Ben Howes_hok0rq

I've given it a look but had to revert to the "old experience" because:

1. I need a logo image in the header

2. I use the `<span id="title">` etc substitutions for page elements, these don't appear to be in the new version yet?

Will these features be added?

Tammy Lessley

We need the ability to put our company logo into the PDF export header and footer. This needs to be part of this development effort.

Andreas Klopp

Dear Confluence PDF export team,

I think it's great that you've taken up this issue. We need to create some documents for accountants, auditors and process documents as PDFs so that we can share them. We currently use an extension for this ;-)

The key feature there is an export button that combines a fixed layout with the current text, as we need different export formats for different purposes. I wish you continued success with the implementation – Andreas

Jamie Knight

Love the simplicity! However, we need the ability to put an image (ex: company logo) into the PDF export header and/or footer.

Asha Goyal_0i7i5i

Great Feature.!! Thanks @Kelly Sitton

Kelly Sitton

Thank you all so much for taking the time to share your feedback, this is exactly what helps us improve! Addressing everyone below:

@James O_Connor Thanks for flagging this! This feature should be available to all spaces, so if you're not seeing it, I'd recommend reaching out to our support team so we can make sure it's enabled for you. It's worth noting the setting isn't in the most obvious spot, it lives under Space Settings -> Look and Feel -> PDF Export (rather than the general space export path). Would love to ensure you get access so you can try it out.

@Rhys Gottwald Great Question! We're currently in beta and actively gathering feedback to shape where this goes. What would be incredibly helpful is if you could submit details via the in product feedback, specifically what header font colors you are looking for and the use case behind it. That context is really valuable for us.

@Lars Maehlmann Completely understand the desire to stick with whats working for you, appreciate the feedback. I'd encourage you to keep sharing details, especially around the footer functionality and any specific examples you can provide. I'd also be happy to jump on a call with you to better understand your needs.

@Koloman Pfeffer Love hearing the macro feedback, thank you! The plan is to roll this out to the Global PDF settings as well once we've gathered enough beta feedback to build out more functionality. If you're open to it, it would be super helpful to get more details on your smart values usage. Specifically where you're using them and what formatting you're working with.

@Ben Howes, @Jamie Knight, @Tammy Lessley, and others asking about images - you're in good company! Image support in headers, footers, and the title page is one of the most common pieces of feedback we're hearing, and it's something we're actively working on. Please continue to provide your specific use cases.

@Ben Howes for your use of the `<span id="title">` etc substitutions for page elements, could you submit details through the in-app feedback with examples. That context would go a long way in making sure we understand your need.

@Andres Klopp Appreciate you describing your workflow need, I'd love to understand your needs a bit more if you're up for a conversation.

@Asha Goyal & @Dirk Ronsmans Thank you both so much, your comments genuinely made our day!

Trish Cescolini

Firstly, thank you so much for enhancing the PDF export feature. I use this feature a LOT to share content with customers. I tried two options with mixed success:

Page numbers: worked but the font size seems to be quite large (larger than the body font size).
Include Title Page: I added some basic text and activated this feature but could never get it to display.

My biggest problem to solve is how to include a page break within a Confluence page so that I don't have to guess at how many blank lines to insert to mimic a page break before exporting. Without this, I can't control how content appears in the PDF.

Ben Howes_hok0rq

In the old/existing export `<span id="title">` and several other similar html tags like `pageNumber` and `date` are supported via the puppeter based export in confluence. The new editor does not seem to allow adding "variables" either like this or with a nicer editor method.

James O_Connor_o89ye8

Thanks @Kelly Sitton - I'm definitely not seeing it so I'll reach out to support.

Lars Maehlmann

@Kelly Sitton

Thank you for your feedback. The footer itself is actually very simple. My key requirement is that I can create official offers in Confluence and send them to our customers with our company’s official information in the footer.

You’re welcome to set up a call so we can go into more detail. In general, the idea is:

A request comes in via our website into Jira, we have an initial call with the customer, document the details in Confluence, and then create a quote in Confluence based on the meeting notes (ideally also using Rovo ;-) ). We then export this as a PDF using our official letter layout, including company details, bank information, and so on.

I’ve also worked with a few customers who generate official letters in Confluence and send them to their own customers in exactly this way.

I hope this helps to understand the requirements. Please feel free to contact me for further details.

Cheers,
Lars

Koloman Pfeffer

@Kelly Sitton

To be completely frank, as of now we don't use the export the old export to PDF-feature, because it doesn't work well with embedded app macros or also layouts, because it would make the page unreadable or content fall off the sides.

Because of this, we mainly used the export to .doc-function and added metadata as needed manually.

Metadata would be our main use case for quality management documentation, where I'd love to be able to automatically include and choose from common page metadata. Most important that come to mind are page title, page owner, last updated by, date of creation, date of last publishing/edit, comment of last edit (if available), version number, labels.

Long story short: everything and then a bit more, that can be found in the page details.
I guess smart values might have been the wrong term then.

Věra Fládrová

Images and other formatting tools would also be useful for the title page. In fact, the easiest way would be to use an editor that uses standard Confluence page editing tools for both the Footer, Header and the title page.

Andreas Klopp

@Kelly Sitton

We can discuss this briefly online—just contact me directly.

laura_white

Thank you so much for working on this!

Bruce Michelsen_08hdnw

This export is simplistic.

I'd like to be able to:

Add logo/images in the header or footer.
Hide elements by class (video, PDF, error panel).
Center page numbering.
Have longer copyright info.
Justify footer or header info.
Have page break control.
Allow for variables.
Manage TOC.
Have multiple layouts.
Have running headings.
Have a background image on the cover page.
Control font size in table cells.

Heike Fischer

Thank you for revamping the export option, it is certainly an improvement from what is available right now.

However, from what I learned here, the native PDF export feature does not fit our needs.

We are very happy with Scroll PDF Exporter by K15t and its PDF extensions features. Why?

Scroll PDF Exporter has everything on board mentioned here also in the discussion section, and much more.

We need and have several templates for different purposes, audiences, with Imprints and legal notices in different languages, disclaimer, etc.

Our PDF templates are branded and the Brand feature in Scroll saves much time when the corporate design changes.

We can also add Watermarks on the fly or as part of the template. We can also control the elements shown in the PDF export, set export names, set page breaks, orientation (great for large tables), and much more.

Scroll PDF Exporter combination with Scroll Documents, we can define a one-click export with a certain PDF template. No need to think about the correct option. If there is no Scroll Documents, I can use labels for the templates to be shown on top of the selection.

I can easily design several templates in a GUID and import PDF templates from the public Template library, do my CI/CD changes and go. No programming expertise needed.

Ralf Münch

Sounds good! But what we are still missing is the option to include page metadata, such als page owner, page status, last update. We have to export documentation for audit purposes and just switched from redundantly tracking this information as page properties to be part of the export to a custom Forge app. However, a native export functionality would be highly appreciated.

Max Lim _ScriptRunner_

If you can't provide the flexibilities of what the current PDF exporter offers with HTML (most of what @Bruce Michelsen described), please don't force this to us. We have production implementations for current PDF exporter.

Perhaps, you can provide a clarity on if the current PDF exporter will remain in future.

Kristian Klima

@Max Lim _ScriptRunner_ and @Bruce Michelsen

If you need advanced PDF and HTML export customization options, you know where to find us

Jamie Knight

This post was published in February - have there been any improvements since?

Welcome!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

Quick Links

Find more posts tagged with

confluence

space

feedback

pdf-export

pdf

user-experience

beta

admin