📣 New feature: Text highlighting in Confluence

[#1]

Hi everyone,

I’m excited to announce the introduction of Text Highlighting to Confluence!

Thank you to everyone that has contributed to this suggestion since it was raised some time ago, we sincerely appreciate your dedication and patience.

What to expect

The ability to highlight text can be easily accessed from the main editing toolbar, located right beside the text color option. There are six highlight colors available - grey, teal, lime, orange, magenta, and purple.

Highlighting, text color, and Comments

When you apply text highlights, they replace text colors (and vice versa). This decision was made to ensure optimal contrast between text and highlights.

When leaving comments on a page, the comment will be given precedence over the highlight. While the colors remain distinct, comments are distinguished by a darker underline, whereas highlights are not.

Highlights are ‘edit only’

Highlighting can only be done by individuals with editing privileges for a page, unlike comments. Many of our customers expressed a desire to have more control over how their Confluence content is presented and draw attention to specific areas through highlighting, a familiar feature in other editing tools - so thats exactly what we’re rolling out today.

Availability

This feature is currently being rolled out and will gradually become available in the upcoming days and weeks for your Confluence cloud instance. We anticipate completing this rollout for all customers during July.

As with all features introduced in Confluence, we are committed to listening to your feedback and making necessary improvements to the feature.

We can’t wait to hear what you think!

❤️ The editor team

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Kieran Gray Thank you for confirming that I hadn't lost the plot when this appeared suddenly in my Free Cloud instance on Friday. 😀

I'm happy for the new features that have been rolled out recently. I'm just sad for the hours/days/weeks I spent figuring out workarounds to accomplish what are now standard features. 😢 I had been using the Status macro to highlight which user roles sections of content apply to (which did not transfer nicely to the TOC for the page). This works much better, but I'm not sure I can go back and replace it everywhere.

[Dave Mathijs]

@Kieran Gray You made my day, I've been wanting this for so long!

[Sven Schatter _K15t_]

Hi @Kieran Gray,

Looks great, thanks for sharing!

I think, since this also impacts apps and customers will expect apps to handle and display background colors properly, this would have been great to also share on the developer community (perhaps even before sharing it here), so Marketplace partners know to adjust their apps accordingly.

Cheers,
Sven

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Thanks for this amazing technicolor improvement @Kieran Gray!

🎥 News so colorful, we just had to sing about it.

[Andy Gladstone]

Something that has been missing for a long time has finally been found. Thanks for this update @Kieran Gray! 

[Sylvain Ménard]

That good news 😀 Thanks for the update, we will patiently wait for its availability in our Confluence instance.

[Simmol]

Good news :) 

It only took 11+ years, someone to actually read and react on what the community expected to have from an WYSIWYG editor. 

I am happy it is finally here, but Atlassian, really need to look into the way they operate with the community. Pretending to listen is not good enough anymore it is not the 90s ...