Realising Good Control Over Output with Confluence

Formatting General Output

In the Space Admin area of Confluence go to the Scroll Wiki PDF Exporter: Template

• Name Must be unique
• Page Layout
  • Different first page
  • Different even and odd pages
  • Straightforward editing of page size, margins, padding, header and footer
    • Margins are defined by
      • (4) Top, Right, Bottom then Left
      • (2) Top and bottom or
      • (1) All
    • Padding is defined by
      • (4) Top, Right, Bottom then Left
      • (2) Top and bottom, then Sides (right and left) or
      • (1) All
• Static Pages
  • Title Page Allows you to edit content using HTML tags. (e.g. inserting <img src="openpetra_logo_final_white_text.png"/>)
• Content Formatting Allows editing of the overall CSS applied to the PDF export, e.g. to center text and images on the title page and make all chapters begin on the right side of the page:

.titlepage {
  text-align: center;
}

h1.heading {
    page-break-before: right;
}

Use this area to modify what tables look like when exported, if not using the table macro see below

Other style sheeting explanations found in the Scroll Wiki Documentation

Example Default Style Sheet

• Fonts Presumably upload custom fonts if referenced in CSS file
• Resources Needs upload of image files included in Static Pages

Formatting Specific Content

Highlighting of Sections

Confluence macros that have predefined tags associated with them that show up nicely in PDF export (able to be manipulated with Style Sheets following DocBook export)

• Info
• Note
• Tip
• Warning
• Panel (possible to use, for just a box around text)

Hyperlinks

Use Scroll Wiki PDF export Linking options so that you can:

• Add page numbers to internal links
• Add URL to external links, and
• Disable links to this Confluence system (which keeps non-exported page links from being converted to absolute links)

Do NOT use monospacing on the text you are using as a link the link will not be exported, and the monospaced text will be smashed up against itself.

Tables

There are also multiple ways to make tables:

• The Table insert drop-down, inserts a table (with the ability to highlight rows or columns using the built-in editing GUI)
• Wiki-markup, e.g.

||table heading||more table heading||
|table cell|another cell|
|another|and another|

produces:

table heading	more table heading
table cell	another cell
another	and another

• Using the table macro, use syntax similar to HTML (see website for example)
  • This gives us the ability to remove borders by setting the border=0 or using the "frame" and "rules" options.
  • It seems like the "class" parameter could be used to set a particular table to a specific CSS class, that could then be defined itself as having particular borders, or not through the style sheet instead of modifying the style sheet for all normally inserted tables to give them no lines or something.

Images

Importing

Attachments option from edit screen allows particular pages to have specific images and keeps track of all images ever included on that page. (You can use it to upload an image then insert it in the page with wiki-markup.)

To insert an image choose one of the following:

• Use Insert > Image (will make the title and name of the image its uploaded file-name)
• Use wiki-markup (e.g. !example.gif! so that the name of the image is not used as a caption when exporting

Exporting

The default Insert > Image option of adding an image to a page makes file-name of the image show up as a caption below the image when it is exported (including the file-extension of .gif, .png, .jpg, etc.)

To remedy this, use wiki-markup when inserting an image and include |title="" so it looks like !example.gif|title=""!

Drop-down Expandable Text

Check to see if this is something that might work when exported to DocBook, because it is automatically expanded in PDF and looks very ugly. Is there a way to find out what tag is being used here?

CSS Classes

Use the div macro and span macro to define content as particular class for use with CSS.

This can also be used for the button effect when exporting to DocBook, not sure about PDF, but presumably if we find the right way to reference it in the right CSS document.