How to add letters (symbols) of another font into Confluence pages?

[Verena Gisler]

Hi everyone

We are just now testing Confluence.
The goal is to use Confluence to create our Customer Help Site. As our product is a software, I need to add a lot of symbols into the articles that represent the buttons in our software. I do not want to add them as pictures, as we source them from a special font made for us. If I need to convert all of the symbols into a picture, this would take some time... 

For example, in Word, I type the text in Arial, then I choose insert > symbol and I pick one from the font that includes our symbols.

How can I add this font and/or the symbols into Confluence? If I do copy/paste, only an empty rectangle appears, as it obviously doesn't recognize the font.

Until now, my research showed the result, that Confluence seems to be quite limited in terms of fonts and sizes, so does this mean, that I cannot add another font? How do others who need their own symbols work with that?

Thanks in advance for your help! 

Verena

EDIT: in the meantime, I tried to add the symbol as picture. But it doesn't seem to be possible to add a picture within the text, the picture will be in the next line instead. This is absolutely unuseful for us, as we write for example: "use the Change button [picture of the change button] to open the change menue.". So the symbol needs to be within the same line as the standard text.

[Barbara Szczesniak · Accepted solution]

@Verena Gisler You should be able to insert the item as an inline image (see https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Inline-images-coming-to-you/ba-p/2611260), but this would involve creating an image file for each symbol, and these files would be attached to every page you use them on. 

To avoid the attachment thing (and make them available to all authors), you could add each of the files you make as a custom emoji. They will then be available to select in the All uploads section in the emoji dialog.

According to this page: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/use-symbols-emojis-and-special-characters/, you should be able to insert from the Character Map or using Alt+number codes, but, when I tried this, the Wingdings character I selected and copied came out as an N in the font used in Confluence.

This page also includes instructions on adding custom emojis.

[Verena Gisler]

Hi Barbara
thank you for your help!

Yes, in the meantime, I also found out how to add a picture to be inline with the text.

I have tried the custom emoji feature and it seems to work well. This solution might be better than to insert pictures again and again and might also be faster (once all needed emojis are made...).

Verena

[Verena Gisler]

Hi @Barbara Szczesniak 
I have tried out to work with Emojis and I think it works quite well. Now I found out that I made a mistake at one of the emojis and wanted to edit. According to this help site Use symbols, emojis, and special characters | Confluence Cloud | Atlassian Support it is possible to use the link https://[yourdomain].atlassian.net/admin/emoji to access the Emoji management. But I receive a page which says "You need permission. Request access from your administrator.". I AM administrator of this product (confluence) and also my colleague from IT who actually opened our whole atlassian account for us cannot open this link. Can you access this?

I also want to try if an emoji, that is inserted and then changed, will also change in all texts or stay as it was and will only be changed in future use...

Thank you!
Verena

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Verena Gisler Yes, I can access that page for my site. I think that, if you can access, admin.atlassian.com for your site, you should be able to get to this page. If that is not your experience, then I'm not sure why I can get to it.

Anyway, this page contains:

• Controls to upload an emoji (same as when using the insert emoji box)
• Settings to Allow people to add custom emojis and Allow custom emojis on publicly shared content
• A list of my custom emojis (search box above), showing the image, name, date added, added by, and Actions. The only action available is Remove.

There is not an explicit way to update an emoji, but maybe adding a new emoji with the same name as the existing emoji replaces the old one? You could try this out (using the insert emoji box) in an experiment to see if it modifies the emoji that you had already inserted on a page.

[Verena Gisler]

Dear Barbara  

thank you so much for your quick answer!

I did some research on permissions and found this:

Product admin

A product admin can manage administration settings for a specific product. They don’t have access to Atlassian Administration. With the exception of Jira family, product admins can access the content within the product they administer. It’s possible to be a product admin for one or more Atlassian products.

From What are the different types of admin roles? | Atlassian Support  

So as I am only a product admin, I cannot access Atlassian Administration which means I cannot access the emoji management. I will check with my colleague again, but in that case I will use pictures maybe even as excerpt, so in case a symbol will change in our software, I can update them in the library of excerpts, and they will be changes everywhere...

Thanks again for your big help!
Verena

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Verena Gisler 

I'm on a Mac and I've just added the following symbols by opening FontBook app (mac native), and copy/pasted individual symbols onto a confluence page.

So it's definitely possible, you just need to find a source from which you can copy the characters that you want to use.

[Verena Gisler]

Hi Kristian

thanks for your reply and help!
As I am using a windows computer, I guess the pendant to your FontBook App would be the Character Map which Tobi mentioned above. However, I did not manage to add fonts via this Character Map, maybe because our font is a private use font  as especially created for us...

Cheers

Verena

[Kristian Klima]

As far as I remember, you can add a font to Character Map.

But if it's a highly custom affair, then I can imagine Confluence (or other tools) might not be able to display it.

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Hi @Verena Gisler ,

Would Windows Character Map be something that's sufficient in this case?

I've just tested it and it seems to be working as expected.

Additionally, you can maybe add symbols as emojis and then add them as a text 🤔

To help a bit further, I would probably need some specific examples. Note that we never had this specific request to support anything else other than language characters, but from what I've seen, new Confluence editor also supports these kinds of symbols.

Cheers,
Tobi

[Verena Gisler]

Hi Tobi

thank you so much for your rapid answer!

I opened the Character Map and also found the font and the corresponding symbols I need. Sorry, but I do not get it how I now can add the symbol on the Confluence page? In Word, I can indeed do drag and drop into the document and the symbol appears, but in confluence only the rectangle appears: .

Thanks,

Verena

[Verena Gisler]

Here is an example

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Huh @Verena Gisler interesting.

I've never used drag-and-drop method but it seems that opening character map > selecting > copying works as expected.

You should be able to insert all available special characters (which have Unicode value).

I didn't manage to find this specific pencil icon which you've posted (I would need font which you've used), but if looking at this symbol, I could simply copy & paste that 

Note that not all symbols in character map are supported. For example, those without standard Unicode value cannot be properly copied and rendered in Confluence. The one in the example below cannot be added to a page:

[Verena Gisler]

Hi Tobi

I need to check internally if I can publish our fonts here...

But if I open the character map, copy is faded and I cannot use it (not matter which font).

Now I checked about the code to enter it manually, but still the rectangle appears. I see that after the code in Character Map it says "private use". Also after some research I checked this symbol in symbl.cc it says private use area. 

In that case I assume that there is no chance to use the fonts direclty. However, I found put how to use a picture inline with the text in Confluence, so I might need to use that.

[Stanley beilx]

Honestly I'm very interesting please guys let's support each other

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Verena Gisler 

This is not possible currently

There's open feature request for this functionality.

CONFCLOUD-46077 Ability to adjust the font size.

Click Vote for this issue and watch the ticket for future updates on the implementation of that feature.

[Verena Gisler]

Hi Marc
thanks, but I am not looking to change the font size (which of course would be a great feature) but to add new fonts to use the symbols.

Thanks

Verena

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Verena Gisler 

This feature is for new fonts and font size, it relates to both topics.

[Verena Gisler]

OK great, then I will of course vote for it :-)

Thank you!

[Stanley beilx]

God bless you you are welcome