Why does confluence waste so much space?

[Andrew Townsend]

We've switched from our own instance to the cloud version, and the default text layout with the new editor wastes huge(!) amounts of space - I get only half the text on a page as I used to.  It feels wasteful and annoying - and scrolling has doubled!

Are there any options for a page to use a more sensible layout?

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi Andrew, Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

This is how Atlassian deals with responsive pages in order to make it fit any screen size. There are different opinions about this.
But anyway:

You can change the width of the page by clicking the icon with the arrow.
Please read Atlassian's answer on this post about this topic. There's also a way to set a default setting for the whole Confluence instance. CONFCLOUD-67503

[Andrew Townsend]

Apologies for not being clear enough (mea culpa)

I meant the vertical spacing.

For instance bullets are twice as far apart as before (literally)

Which is as annoying as the spacing I've used here! :-) 

I think it's the new editor vs. the old.  My pages are now twice as long as before and look ugly (imo)

[Charlie Misonne]

Oh right vertical spacing :-)

Do you happen to have a screenshot so we can see an example?

I haven't been annoyed by vertical spacing so far. Here is an example I quickly created. Is the vertical spacing similar on your pages? Just want to be sure you're not facing a bug or other odd behavior.

The amount of whitespace before a Heading can be seen as a bit much. But it does not annoy me to be honest.

[Andrew Townsend]

Sure - new editor on the left vs. old editor on the right.  It literally is like a giant large print book, except my laptop screen is still the same size, so I see much less useful text on screen.

[Charlie Misonne]

The font size looks larger as well.

But I'm afraid there's nothing to do about this.

You could fill out the feedback form:

[Andrew Townsend]

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for the reply, but your reply doesn't offer any hope (and your profile lists you as an Atlassian consultant).

It seems very deficient to have no such layout controls, and sadly makes Confluence a poorer tool for documentation.

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi Andrew,

Indeed, unfortunately not everything can be solved. Especially when using Atlassian Cloud. I think most SaaS solutions are typically less customizable.

[Andrew Townsend]

What do you mean when you say "Especially when using Atlassian Cloud"?

That sounds like you mean many people have things they don't like but Atlassian's not responsive and that it's not worth giving feedback or requesting changes?

Google searches for solutions to new editor issues unfortunately only uncover long threads of people who have been complaining about it for several years, and still appear to be complaining about it - so I don't hold out much hope for "Give Feedback"