Where is the stlye- and div-macro?

[Lukas Naef]

Hi There

I did some formatting for proper PDF exports with the style-macro. Now after the update to the new design in the confluence cloud, I miss the macros "Style" and "Div".

Where is it? Do they have a new name? Are there any other possibilities?

I know, there are plugins to do more advanced PDFs but we have some boundaries to the budget I'm not allowed to break.

Thx for your inputs!

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello, @Lukas Naef ! Thanks for sharing your needs with the community.

I would like to start by stating that, in fact, both Style and Div macros have been deprecated. They were not renamed or replaced. We can get more information about it here:

• [Confluence Cloud] [We're cleaning up the macro browser – Other macros being deprecated]

Currently, there is no native alternative that replaces those macros. We can send our feedback about this removal here:

• [Confluence Cloud] [CONFCLOUD-65317] [Macro Removal Feedback]
• [Confluence Cloud] [CONFCLOUD-65774] [Div macros Removal Feedback]

For PDF formatting, the Atlassian Marketplace does have some options that might help your situation. Here, have a look:

• [Atlassian Marketplace] [Confluence Cloud – PDF]

As a first step, my advice is that you provide your feedback about the removal of both macros on the report linked above. Also, try to watch and vote for the reports. Voting can help to increase the report visibility and watching will update you whenever something new happens there!

So, Lukas, I hope this sheds some light on the current situation of those macros.

Looking forward to your reply.

[Lukas Naef]

Hi @Diego , thank you very much for your answer.

That's what I was afraid of. Of course I can provide my feedback to the pages, but it does not solve our problem in a timely manner.

We are now forced to write the documentation in word (All the documentations we need as a proper pdf). In my opinion it is not really fair to remove features for which there are no alternatives.

I think I will reopen a new question to the community to get best practices about getting a proper formatted document out of the new cloud solution. The main points were:

• Style-Macro
  • Adding content to title page (like document title, we used css content-feature)
  • Toc formatting
• Div-Macro (with HTML classname)
  • Pagebreaks in PDF (css definition in global PDF Stylesheet)
  • PDF to landscape for certain pages (css definition in global PDF Stylesheet)

Other option is to check a server-licence to have all the nice features like: User-Macro, HTML-Macro to hopefully solve this issue...

(As I already wrote in the text above, we are not able to pay for another plugin for this Issue. I just wanted to extend the licence to more user but the more plugins..., we have to evaluate options first)

[Diego]

Hello @Lukas Naef ! Thanks for keeping the thread alive.

I believe that you are right. Interacting with the feedback thread will most likely not solve your situation in a timely manner.

However, as of today, this is the best course of action we could take. Providing feedback on the removal or inclusion of features on our Cloud instance helps to create a better tool for the future.

Every bit and piece of feedback is wonderfully valuable for us. For page breaks in PDF, you can check this report! One of my colleagues posted a comment with a solution there:

• [Confluence Cloud] [CONFCLOUD-28115] New Macro: Provide Page Break macro

And for the PDF in landscape orientation, we also have this report that sports a workaround as well. Here, take a look:

• [Confluence Cloud] [CONFCLOUD-66173]  Export page to PDF truncates tables in the new editor

Now, for the Table Of Content macro formatting, I currently have no solution to provide here for you, Lukas.

Let me know if the information here helps you in some way! I encourage you to provide your own experience as feedback within the reports.

Looking forward to your reply.

[Deniz Parlar]

Thanks @Lukas Naef for starting this thread, I too was wondering what happened to the DIV macro in this update. Hoping I can piggyback off of the discussion here.

@Diego do you know of any suggested solution for replacing the DIV macro functionality? The idea is that I'm trying to programmatically update the content of a Confluence page via the Confluence Cloud REST API (through regular expressions, which the DIV macro made easy to target).

Thanks!

[Daniel]

To me it is not understandable that the editor misses such basic features and moreover that some that were already available on the previous editor are missing on the new version (supposedly enhanced)!

Not sure why JIRA cloud is struggling with this with so much feedback on this topic for years...

As Lukas says you are inviting people to use MS products for this, which is a shame.

Hope you can sort it soon. 

[Renick]

I also just saw that I can't create pages like some months ago. Now I'm a bit frustrated because I need to invest more time into creating some pages than I should. Breaking existing behavior isn't really enterprise. And the DIV macro was one of the basic elements which provided me some customization options. Without applying some custom styles, my pages look terrible.

[Ken Poulton]

Breaking Things = Bad

This kind of cavalier attitude to existing content is an ongoing frustration with Confluence. We spend a lot of time getting pages to look right and then you remove basic features. 

We have long time horizons here - we are documenting hardware that stays in production for 5 years and in support for 10 more.  Is is asking too much that existing documentation pages not get broken by updates?

[Enrico Karg]

In general it is not good that so many macros are not available in confluence cloud anymore. I used the multiple except macro for including content from various pages into a single one. Now I see it its only possible to use one single excerpt on each page.

But I am using the excerpt macro already for hiding (instructional) content in my templates. Now I want to use this exceprt for the more important stuff which should be displayed on a summarizing page and wanted to use the DIV macro to hide the instructional content. But this is gone as well. 

If you keep on going like this, we will never complete our switch to cofluence cloud and will be forced to evaluate other tools.

This is not a good direction you are heading...