Exported PDFs now more accurately match Confluence pages

[Steven Bao]

This has been starting to roll out again as of April 2023.

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NOTE: On November 14, 2022, we rolled back the Confluence PDF export feature to its previous implementation. We understand the rollback may impact the performance of this specific feature. We appreciate your patience and understanding while we address the issue.

We will post an additional changelog entry when we are ready to resume the rollout of the new export.

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Hey everyone,

Steven here from the Confluence Cloud Product Management team. Following on from the bug fixes earlier (check it out here), we have revamped your PDF export functionality so it now mirrors what is shown on your Confluence page.

Examples of Page Element Differences

	Confluence Page	PDF Before	PDF After
Page Link
Task
Date
Table

NOTE: If @page customizations are being applied in the space PDF stylesheet, you won’t see the improvements to PDF being applied as they are incompatible at the moment.

Thank you for your patience and continued feedback on JAC tickets. We are confident that this update will improve your export experience, and we will continue to keep an eye on your suggestions for further improvements. Try it for yourself, and please leave any comments or questions below!

We’re also continuing to iterate including applying page level improvements to space level PDF exports. If you use that functionality, we would love to hear from you in the comments below. In addition, we’re investigating how other customization options can add additional value. If there are specific customization functionalities you require today, I’d recommend checking options on the Atlassian marketplace. 

Cheers,

Steven

[Andy Gladstone]

@Steven Bao thanks for sharing. PDF export is a major pain point for our organization and on the community as a whole. These improvements, while not the last that are needed, are very welcome.

[Jon Watts]

Hey @Steven Bao 
Thanks for the update and well done to the team on these improvements and bug fixes.
Where can I record/log issues that we are still having with tables in export to PDF?
e.g.
I have a Confluence page where the table has been resized to fit the columns to page full-width however when exporting to pdf the table header row appears randomly in three different places within the document and also the table still does not fit to page.

Thanks
Jon

[Steven Bao]

Hey @Jon Watts - apologies for the late response, I was on leave.

In general reach out to support here as they will triage bug reports.

To make sure I understand, PDF exports in your case were previously printing fine, but now do not with the changes?

Cheers,

Steven

[Oliver Christmann]

THIS is very welcome! Great improvements we are waiting for so long.

Thank you.

[Joel Courtney]

Fantastic!

Please tell me the team also amended the file name convention while they were at it? Please?

Also

Following on from the bug fixes earlier 

That was ~18 months back 😬

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Edit: nope … still the same awful naming convention…

141022-014345

Aka `DDMMYY-HHMMSS`

[Steven Bao]

Hey @Joel Courtney - thank you for the feedback, this is one of the tickets in the backlog. What would your preferred file format be?

Cheers,

Steven

[Joel Courtney]

Hi @Steven Bao , thanks for responding!

I'm a big fan of ISO8601 / RFC3339. Given the limits on filesystems an characters, I'd probably lean towards a simplified ISO8601 UTC timestamp. For example, the above one is currently:

141022-014345

This should instead be one of the following (there's arguments on each):

• 20221014T014345Z

• 20221014-014345Z

• 20221014-014345

• 20221014014345

My preference would be the first one as it is the one most strongly aligned with the datetime presentation standards referenced above. Added bonus, natural sorting in filesystems by text ASC.

[Oliver Christmann]

I totally agree

[kasper]

I see resolution of SVG files in the PDF exports have greatly improved, this was our biggest problem, super.

I have checked the smart links, and they look good in Adobe reader. But in some other PDF viers, ex. macOS builtin Preview, smart links get a double border in two different gray's, that doesn't look quite as nice as in the HTML. Here is a screenshot from a PDF:

Also, we use @page customisations, so when do you expect the changes to also rollout for @page customised spaces?

[Michaela Mayer _K15t_]

Hey Steven, Thanks for this post, it’s exciting to see what the Atlassian team is planning and shipping. 🤩

While we’re waiting for the next improvements to the in-built Confluence exporter you could have a look at our app to improve your daily export workflow.

As I can see in the comments here, sometimes you need some more advanced settings, for example when working in regulated work environments or you want to define custom documents placeholders for e.g. names, dates, page properties and metadata. Our app Scroll PDF Exporter for Confluence Cloud covers it all and comes with a visual template editor which offers customization options for just about everything.

[Krista Stellar]

Like others, I'm glad to see Atlassian making headway on improving the PDF export as it is much needed. I'll chime in to say that we find for those that are in need of more advanced PDF export functionality, we can heartily endorse the Scroll PDF Exporter. It has far exceeded my expectations.

It's easy to adopt and has made it possible for us to move significant aspects our of business out of Word documents and into our Confluence spaces, knowing that we can get professional looking PDFs suitable for sharing to wide audiences and printing.

[Kristján Mathiesen]

Noice! Thanks @Steven Bao 

[Alex Barnaba]

Well done!

[Erik Boelen]

Great to see that PDF's now look more like the actual Confluence page!

It would also be great to see an option to add version information either in the header/footer or in a small table at the top of the PDF.

[Sandro Barbieri]

@Steven Baoimprovements are welcome.

But what we need is a choice at export time of portrait OR landscape mode AND optional Time/Date Footer.

The last 10 years I had to doo this circus everytime:

- go to settings-> look & feedl -> pdf export -> pdf stylesheet settings

- change the code to either portrait A4 ord landscape A4 like this

/*The A4 portrait paper size is 210 mm wide by 297 mm long*/
size: 210mm 297mm;

/*The A4 landscape paper size is 297 mm wide by 210 mm long*/
/*size: 297mm 210mm; */

then, change the footer left

@bottom-left
{
content: "last update: 25.11.2022 / v1.54";
font-family: ConfluenceInstalledFont, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 8pt;
}

then, change the footer right directive every year

@bottom-right
{
content: "Copyright 2018 - 2022, all rights reserved";
font-family: ConfluenceInstalledFont, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 8pt;
}

Dates and/or Versions could be automated, years could be automated.

Few fields in the export dialog to set those settings like in a desktop printer dialog / UI would be great to have.

cheers