Confluence editor going haywire

[Zim Chan]

I'm a longtime fan of Confluence who has just started 'using it in anger' towards a more thorough suitability trial a company technical documentation CRM. I've been experiencing some erratic behaviour in the editor which is probably best demonstrated by examples:

Example 1

image2016-12-21 5:45:57.png

If I press enter here I'd expect the line to be broken, instead I get this:

image2016-12-21 5:45:41.png

Note that the line is not broken and a new line has instead been inserted afterwards (the cell is 1 line bigger)

Example 2

image2016-12-21 5:46:52.png

If I copy this text and paste it into a new document, I get this:

image2016-12-21 5:47:12.png

Newlines appear to be been inserted (above the table, and in the last cell)

Example 3

image2016-12-21 5:47:42.png

If I press enter here I get the below, which is expected:

image2016-12-21 5:48:0.png

If I attempt to undo (via Ctrl-Z) I would expect that line I just inserted to be removed, instead I get this:

image2016-12-21 5:48:41.png

Here a newline appears to have been inserted between the table and the text above it, and my cursor has moved above my text.

Example 4

image2016-12-21 5:49:11.png

The spacing between each table and the text above this is different. Short of deleting the table and recreating it, I cannot figure out how to change the spacing of the first table to match that of the second (which appears to be the default). Inserting a new line and then deleting it does not work. I'm not even sure how this was generated in the first place (maybe a weird paste) as attempting to Ctrl-Enter and insert a table does not generate this close-spacing.

--- end example ---

This behaviour is somewhat reminiscent of pre-2000 WordPerfect and Word products and in my ~30 hours of Confluence editing I experience it multiple times daily. While some of it may seem pedantic, it is actually quite disruptive of workflow, and it is hard to make an argument for Confluence when comparable editing products (Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer) are substantially less problematic in this respect.

I haven't been able to find any posts or reports of similar behaviour which makes me think that either this problem is unique or just widely accepted (which would be surprising considering Confluence's popularity).

My questions are:

• Is this normal?
• If not, what are the potential culprits?
• if not, how can I further investigate the issue?
• If so, are there any workarounds?
  • e.g. is there a way to reset the editor/document state to prevent this?
  • Or assuming the document state is corrupted Is there a best practice for transferring this to a new document short of painstakingly copying without formatting and reformatting everything (recreating images, tables, headers etc)

My setup:

• Confluence 5.10.7
  • (changelog for 5.10.8 did not mention any editor fixes so have not bothered applying)
• Editing in Chrome Version 55.0.2883.87 m (64-bit)
  • While I do use various plugins, I have attempted to do editing in Incognito mode and experienced the same behaviour

Some of this is actually quite hard to reproduce as after performing the various actions and getting weird behaviour, it can often fix itself or move into different weird behaviour. I have some stored wiki documents that can reproduce some of this that I would be happy to attempt to copy into a sandbox if desired.

[Stefan Ernst [Realigned.io] · Accepted solution]

the Confluence editor has its quirks, see for example

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-34278

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-35942

so what you are describing is not unusual or unheard of. I think most users have come to accept these issues and just live with them. But I wont say this is a desired situation.

Check jira.atlassian.com for known issues and vote for the ones which affect you. Hopefully with enough votes, these issues get resolved sooner

[MattS]

I would send the info to Atlassian Support and ask them to create one or more bugs for this. They will want to know OS and version, browser and version and any other info you can give them to get a series of Steps To Reproduce

[Zim Chan]

Thanks for the info. Mildly disturbing that this is just how it is (given the frequency and inability to workaround it short of re-formatting everything), but good to know. I see there is a Confluence Source Editor, I'll investigate that as a possible tool to mitigate some of the more painful issues.