Copy/pasted content inserts extra paragraph breaks/new lines, breaks formatting

[Mariya Rybak]

Hi all,

Our team has been moving content over from other tools and has ran into the issue of copy/paste creating extra paragraph breaks/new lines -- where we have just one paragraph break, Confluence inserts two. This breaks our general formatting and requires edits every time, and gets really tedious for long documentation or for things like email templates we've copied over.

I've tried searching for bugs on this and haven't been able to find any, but before I filed a bug with Atlassian I wanted to see if there's a way around this that maybe we haven't discovered yet? Any suggestions from y'all?

Thanks in advance!

[Sam Ugulava]

Hi @Mariya Rybak

I'm a Product Manager on the Confluence Content Experience team. My team is going to investigate this bug in our next sprint. Hopefully should be a simple fix, but I'll circle back once we have more information. Thanks for flagging this. I completely empathize with how frustrating this would be as you move content into Confluence. 

[Mariya Rybak]

Exciting, thanks so much @Sam Ugulava !

[buddha]

Any news on this?

[Bill Bailey]

@buddha best thing is to watch the Confluence issues: CONFCLOUD-73315 . But given that there are so few people watching the issue, it will probably never get fixed.

[John Price]

@Sam Ugulava I see the same thing in Jira Cloud.  Pretty often I send an Outlook email and then paste the text into a comment as a quick record like:

"Emailed Bob:

(pasted email)"

This always doubles the whitespace.  I assume it's because Windows line breaks are CR+LF. 

I'm now watching the Confluence issue above but don't see one for Jira.

[Bill Bailey]

Hello @Mariya Rybak If you are pasting from word, this can happen if people are using returns in between paragraphs. It is annoying. Plus often there is inline formatting that gets pasted in as well from some sources. My process is to use the source editor, and a number of save Regex routines to clear out the junk.

I would also suggest looking the Word import function if that helps. And take a good look at your source to see what you are ACTUALLY pasting in.

[Mariya Rybak]

Is the source editor/regex available on Cloud to set that up?

Also, we're copying from Google Docs.

[Bill Bailey]

Yes, there is a paid plugin editor for the Cloud:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1215664/source-editor-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

It might be that google doc natively has two returns. I can use the browser to inspect function to see.

[Mariya Rybak]

@Bill Bailey a paid plugin should not be the answer here. :(

I talked to Atlassian Support and this is actually buggy behavior. Here's the bug -- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-73315

[Bill Bailey]

Interesting. Do you have the option to export to Word from Google docs? And then maybe an import into Confluence wont have the same issue?