Is there a way to Justify text in Confluence Cloud editor?

[Nivedita]

Apart from Left, Right and Center Align, is there a way to Justify alignment as in word? 

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello again, @Nivedita ! Great to see that you are really active here in our community.

To be really direct and clear, I will say we can not. This decision is based mainly on the accessibility of our platform.

You can check more details about it here, under this report:

• [Confluence Cloud] [CONFCLOUD-36671]  Confluence should have Align: justify function for text

Here is an excerpt from that report:

Firstly, some background on our decision not to provide the option to align: justify. You can read more about it here] http://www.dyslexiaaction.org.uk/page/text-formatting-best-practice and here https://designforhackers.com/blog/justify-text-html-css/ but the short answer is that:

Justification is not good for accessibility, and we strive to make all of our products as accessible as possible.

Web browsers at the moment are not good at handling justification and so instead of hyphenation and modified kerning, just add large spaces in between words.

So, for short, we can not justify text in Confluence. Hope this answers your question, Nivedita!

Let me hear from you.

[Oscar Kramer]

Hmm. Sounds like a poor justification for no justification.

[nmart1n]

I thought so, Oscar and then I read that it can be a problem for people with dyslexia.

https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/design-readability

[AP]

I don't know. Out of curiosity, I opened a few (paper) books I have on my desk and they are all "justified". (and visually more appealing than left-justified) Same with a few magazines.

In 2022, Confluence is the only editor that does not support "justify" alignment yet :(

[Arno Wolthers]

If I look at the formatting of Diego's answer I would argue that accessibility was not the primary focus while answering this question.

[Philip_gillespie]

Accessibility is about adding options, not limiting them.  If Atlassian truly cared about accessibility, it would add options to switch between justified and left aligned text. Everyone could then have a choice about how to read content.

[Marina Kovacevic]

Adding more and more plugins to Confluence loses the purpose of it. Why should I use it if it doesn't have basic stuff like justifying text!? Switching back to MS Word and SharePoint doesn't sound so bad now, at least it would spare me some headache...