Formatting changing randomly in Confluence
Asked by Mick Davidson:

Star Date: Tea-dium

For some time now the page formatting in our wiki has been changing on a random, but consitent, basis.

For example:

1. I have a page that already has content which is formatted all nicely.

2. I add a Warning box which automatically adds an extra space between itself and the following line. In the most recent case, this is a H2.

3. When I delete the extra space, the H2 jumps up one line as desired, however it also reformats itself to Paragraph.

4. At least that what the editor says. In reality the formatting is neither H2 nor a Paragraph but somewhere inbetween.

5. No matter what I do I cannot get the formatting to stay at H2. This includes saving the page and navigating away from it then coming back via several other pages or refreshing it.

6. There are other variations to both how this happens and what the results look like. For example, H2 is applied, but the font size is more like H6, but with an underline.

We're using 4.3.7 and I'm editing in Chrome, but this happens in Firefox and IE. It also happens to other users.

Any suggestions? Cheers.


Answers:
author: Anthony Allen
body: How is it 2020 and this is still a major annoyance?

comments: author: Formica
body: I can confirm that nearly eight years later, this problem is still extant and frustrating. I have tried using the in-line Confluence Markup tags to try and get around it, but that does not really do much to resolve the issue, particularly with things like the preformatted text setting. I am attempting to get my administrator to install the Source Editor as suggested below (eight years ago!) in order to work around the problem.

It would be nice if there was an option for a Markdown Mode that used pure Markdown like everything else in the collaborative development world, instead of Atlassian's proprietary mix of Markdown, HTML, and unique tagging.


author: Matthew J. Horn
body: You need the source editor plugin to resolve these kinds of GUI glitches:

<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.editor.confluence-source-editor>

It's free and indispensable.


author: Mick Davidson
body: @atlassian

I'm still having this problem, only now it's really getting on my nerves.

I've just spent ten minutes trying to get a H3 to be a H3, not some variation that looks like Paragraph combined with H3 (or H2 etc).

I've tried various ways to sure this, including using Preformatted and then changing it back to H3. Still fails. However when I do this, ALL the text BEFORE the H3 is changed to Preformatted, but not the line I'm actually trying to change. This is repeatable.

At the moment there is nothing I can do to resolve this issue: what answers do you have?

The page was created by myself within the last week and is a normal page, ie, not created from a template.

Cheers


author: CharlesH
body: @Mick

Users in my company have occassionally suffered from odd editing effects. We're using Confluence 4.2.1 by the way. It seems that even being careful with the editor (by applying attributes by choosing from the pre-defined list of styles in the rich text editor) is not enough. Next time the page is edited, the formatting may have gone quirky.

I've tried to replicate this, but so far without success. I have examined pages where these effects have occurred, and I've found the same thing that you've described - \<span\> tags within other elements, and those span tags carry inline style attributes which can be a pain to get rid of, even with the Clear Direct Formatting option.

The Stylish plugin for Firefox has been helpful in investigating this (you'll need the plugin and the rule set for the Confluence rich text editor - see links below)

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/>

<http://userstyles.org/styles/69505/confluence-rich-text-editor-show-tags>

Sorry that I can't offer a solution, but knowing that others have this issue may be help work towards a solution.

Regards,

Charles

comments: author: Mick Davidson
body: Charles,

thanks for the info. At the moment I'm dealing with it all manually (as are my colleagues). We're only using the built in styles, so it's nothing we're doing.

It seems that once a page starts doing this, it's likely to repeat the error.

Cheers.


author: Mick Davidson
body: It would be great if someone from #Atlassian could respond to this. I've now got another colleague having the same problem and it's ongoing for me and others.


author: Mick Davidson
body: In the interim, I've found that this proble can be cured by opening the HTML screen and manually editing the HTML. This works every time.

However it doesn't explain why this is happening.

When I look at the HTML it looks something like this:

\<h2\>  
\<span style="font-size: 10.0pt;line-height: 13.0pt;"\> \</span\>  
\<h2\>

This shows that the span style HTML has been added into the heading HTML. So it's easy to cure but there's no explanation as to why it's happening.

Cheers.


Tags: format

heading