How can I control leading (the amount of vertical space between lines of text)?

[Debra Graham]

For example, I want to change the leading for text formatted as Heading 2.  I want more space above the heading and less space following it.  In Word, I would modify the Spacing attributes for the Heading 2 paragraph style (see below).  How do I do that in Confluence?  Can I redefine the attributes of the default Heading 2 style?  Similarly, how would I change the default color of the Heading 2 style?

I think that the answer is going to be that I need to edit the CSS stylesheet but I'm asking just to see if there is an alternative as I have little experience with CSS.  

[Bill Bailey]

I am assuming you are wanting to make this change site/space wide. If so, the easiest, cheapest and most effective  way to accomplish this is to edit the CSS stylesheet. This is something I do every time I set up a new Confluence server, to a) fix annoying issues and b) to have Confluence conform more to the clients branding requirements.

There are plenty of resources out there regarding CSS, and if you really are anal about how text is styled in Confluence (like me, coming from FrameMaker), you need to learn this skill (plus how to inspect elements within a browser).

Here is good place to start:

https://www.w3schools.com/Css/

Have fun!

[Debra Graham]

Thanks for your response Bill.  Not sure how widely we want to make changes.  Investigating what we want for technical documentation, sales and marketing, and technical briefs.  Our company isn't large but different groups have stakes in the Confluence site.  :)   

I also have a FrameMaker background but it is my belief that professional writing should have a polished appearance.  I am surprised how difficult Confluence makes it--Confluence seems to be more about enabling internal collaboration than external presentation.  My company would like to use it for both.

[Bill Bailey]

Yeah, it is a compromise, but I find that the speed of creating documentation because of the collaboration far outweighs presentation.

Now for PDF, we went to Scroll PDF (version 3.x), because at least I could get about 90% of what I could with FrameMaker. It took some work, user macros, and custom CSS, but it is good enough.

For online you can do a lot with styling. Here is an example based on 5.x of Confluence and custom CSS.

http://confluence.marketcomllc.com/display/PUBLIC/Documentation+Example

[Donald Hutton]

I'm using Confluence to export to HTML so that the document I'm making can be put up as a website.  I find that if I don't do anything special the paragraphs, lists, macro output, headers, and so on will be vertically right next to each other with no space in-between.  So that's zero spacing.

If I want a little more spacing then I insert a "division" or horizontal line. I'll call that 1/2 spacing.  For more than that I put in empty sections with the toolbar button that puts in a split screen section with various options of the relative size of those and some three section splits.  That lets me space things out to any degree.

For horizontal spacing I use the aforementioned split screen button.

That's pretty much all I care about for formatting.  Don't care about fonts: if it's all in comic-sans I'm good with that.  Other presentation variables I leave to the users' browser themes and controls.

[Bill Rudy]

You don't.  At least I'm not aware of such options...if someone knows of one, I welcome the correction.  Keep in mind this is a wiki, not a word processor.  :)  The focus is on content and collaboration/sharing of that content in a structured, organized way vs high-powered formatting.  There are tons of plugins around however, so you might try a search on those... 

[Debra Graham]

My company uses Confluence for both an internal wiki (used by the developers--I work for a software company) and also for presenting end-user documentation, hence, the need for polished presentation.  I have been researching various plugins but not found one yet that lets me "redefine" the styles w/o resorting to adding our own CSS stylesheet.