Changing site typesize

Question

Gentlefolk,

Please forgive the very newbie question, but I am a very Confluence newbie.

I gather that the only way to change a typesize or typestyle in a site is to do so in the site's CSS? It seems odd that other formatting options can be applied - bolding, italic, underlining, superscripting, strikethrough and so forth, but the typesize itself cannot be changed.

I found these instructions, but they date back to 2012. Has anything changed?

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/107776

My site is (company name deleted):

http://confluence.xxx.yy.zzz.com/pages/editpage.action?pageId=17633793

I assume this indicates that I have an installed and not a cloud site?

Thank you for your forbearance for this elementary question.

Don Wallbaum · Answer

Hi Tom,

Thank you for your links and background information, I profited from both.

I agree that unrestrained user-access to design options is not a good thing. HOWEVER, inexplicably to me, the trend in designing content for the web has been toward smaller and smaller typefaces and an impossible to justify trend of using light grey as a color of body text. (Note: I have NOT seen grey Confluence body type, so thank you for that bit of sanity.)

Research on web usability is pretty consistent: Reading from a screen is more difficult than paper. It tires the eyes more - probably from fighting the backlighting of the screen, though the biology on this is still being researched.

What this means is that body type for web-based publications should be easily scannable by the eyes, and that means to improve character recognition, you make the typeface LARGER with more leading between lines.

The default typeface for Confluence is at least two points too small. One does not need to have a headache imposed on all the other ills of staring as a glowing box all day. So some reasonable adjustment to fonts seems not only logical, but inescapable.

Now, my access to Confluence is through a laptop. I have not accessed Confluence from a large-monitored desktop, but virtually everyone in my company is using 15 inch laptops. This mobile configuration with its inherent limitations needs to be addressed.

And yes, the browser can be zoomed, but this then hides the controls that Confluence has, which leads to another level of frustration.

Thank you for allowing me air my objections to a design criterion made by Atlassian. Great products can suffer from very simple design choices.

Don

TomC · Answer

Don,

I understand your frustration. It is true that there is the CSS option (here's a page associated with the latest version of Confluence, v 5.10): https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/styling-fonts-in-confluence-174751968.html

And you may benefit from reviewing this similar question: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/30321

All this being said, as an admin and Confluence champion for a Confluence instance with now over 50,000 unique pages, perhaps my own journey from initially being frustrated with the lack of font options to now could help...

We have 8000 employees, a few hundred spaces (dozens of them accessible by all employees), and almost that many space admins. Reducing the list of fonts helps - which I've bought into by the way - by creating some consistency between sites.    We're not all good at knowing what looks good and some folks given a tool for making widely accessible pages with too much creative control can make things look hideous without them realizing it. =)

One way I 'play' with text as I need to, beyond the use of the Paragraph mode and the headers, is to utilize superscript/subscript to create 'tiny text' on single lines at times.  Six or seven years in, we've never had the reason to venture into further styling fonts, though it's nice to know the option exists.

There's other tricks you can play with too, like this one: http://stiltsoft.com/blog/2014/01/atlassian-confluence-look-feel-tricks-tweaking-page-titles/

Hope those links help and yes your site appears to be 'Server' from the URL you shared.