Export Templates

Every team has a house style. The trouble is that it usually lives in one person’s head, and every document drifts a little further from it.

Export templates fix that. Set up the cover, the header, the margins and the watermark once, give it a name, and it belongs to everyone on your site. The next person to export a handbook picks Customer Handbook and gets a document that matches the last one exactly.

Four ready to use, right now

You do not start from a blank page. XPress ships with four templates covering what most teams export:

Simple document	Clean A4 portrait. The one you will reach for most days.
Report with cover	A title page and a linked contents page, for anything you send outward.
Confidential	A diagonal watermark on every page, plus a CONFIDENTIAL header and a Do not distribute footer.
Wide (landscape)	Landscape with tight margins, so big tables and diagrams actually fit.

Use them as they are, adapt one, or build your own. Nobody owns the starters, so an admin can clear them away once your own templates take over.

See it before you export

Open the export settings and choose Manage → Templates, or press Templates at the top of the XPress page under Apps. The designer fills the screen: your templates down the left, the document in the middle, every control on the right.

That preview in the middle is not a mock-up. It lays your template out on a real page - cover, margins, header, footer, page numbers, watermark - over sample content, so you can judge the finished document without exporting one. Change a margin and the page moves. No export, check, adjust, export again. Your site logo sits on the preview’s cover, and in its header or footer, right where the export will put it. The one thing that looks different on paper is your own pages, which keep their Confluence styling in the finished export.

A Markdown template has no page to lay out, so its preview shows what it makes instead: the files of the export and the Markdown of each page, made from sample pages by the same converter every export uses.

New starts a fresh template. Duplicate copies the one you are looking at - which is how you build on a colleague’s template, or on one of the starters, without changing what everyone else is using.

One space, one look, zero effort

Point a space at a template and every one-click export in it - the Export (XPress) action in a page’s byline, the one in the ··· menu - uses that template automatically.

Nobody has to remember. Nobody has to open the settings. The Engineering space produces Engineering documents, the Sales space produces Sales documents, and it happens whether or not the person exporting has ever thought about templates.

Setting a space’s default is an admin decision, because it changes what every export in that space looks like. Space admins and site admins can set it; for everyone else it simply is not there. In the space’s XPress page, open Settings, pick the template and press Use as space default. The window that opens lists what the template locks; tick Lock this template in this space when every export from the space must use it, then confirm. The picker marks it Space default from then on, so everyone can see the look the space has chosen.

The two locks work together. Say the template’s owner locks the company header in the designer, and the space admin locks the template in the space. Every export from the space then carries that header, nobody there can pick another template, and the paper and the cover stay each person’s to choose. See A default template per space.

Your favourites, and the one you used last

Pick a template once and XPress remembers it for you. Choose it in the space’s XPress page, export, and from then on it is where the picker starts in any space that has not chosen a default, and what your one-click exports use for pages no space and no label has claimed. The Will export panel says so: the template you used last. Changed your mind? Pick Simple document again, export once, and XPress goes back to starting from it.

Templates you reach for often can lead the list. Select one and press Add to my favourites: your favourites sit at the top of the picker with a star, up to twenty of them. They are yours alone. Nobody else’s list changes, and nobody sees yours.

A space’s choice still comes first. Where a space has a default template, the picker starts on it and one-click exports use it, and a space that locks its template exports with it whatever you used elsewhere.

Shared, but not fragile

A template your team relies on cannot be quietly changed underneath them. Anyone can create a template, but only the person who made it - or a site admin - can edit or delete it.

Open someone else’s and the designer tells you plainly that it is read-only, and offers Duplicate. You get your own copy to change, and theirs stays exactly as it was.

Need a one-off? In the export settings, choose Adjust for this export and change whatever the template leaves unlocked. XPress flags the settings panel while they differ from the template, with Reset to template to put them back, and leaves the template itself untouched.

Exporting a single page from the XPress page under Apps? Pick it, and the Will export panel changes the paper size, cover, contents and watermark for that export alone - see One-Click Export.

Lock what every document must keep

Some settings are not a matter of taste: the legal line in the footer, the confidential watermark, the file name your archive sorts by. Lock them in the template, and everyone who exports with it keeps them.

In the designer, every setting that shapes the document has a padlock beside it. Press it, and everyone who exports with the template gets that value: they see it with a padlock beside it and cannot change it for their export. Press it again to let it go. A line at the top of the settings names everything the template locks, even settings on rows you cannot see right now. Only the template’s creator or a site admin can lock or unlock them, the same people who can edit it. Open someone else’s template and you see what it locks, without being able to change it.

A lock holds the whole setting. The margins lock holds all four sides and the mirroring, the watermark lock holds its words and its look, and a detail that belongs to a setting is locked with it, such as where the page numbers sit and how they are written. The header’s three places lock together, and so do the footer’s, so a legal line split across the left and the right is held as one line.

A locked header or footer with words in it, a locked logo in the header or footer, or locked page numbers that are switched on, keep every export a PDF, since that is the only place they print. They also keep room to print: at least 8 mm at the edge they sit on unless you lock the margins too, and the cover sheet unless you lock the cover page too. The designer holds Format at PDF and says where the rest applies, until you unlock them.

A locked watermark with words of its own is held the way a space holds one it requires. Every export keeps each margin at 40 mm or less, locked margins included, so the watermark has room to print whole, and a {title} or {space} in it takes no more room than its own words. The designer’s preview draws the page that way and says so beside the margins.

A Markdown template can lock its format, its file name and its Markdown settings. A lock on anything of a page, such as the paper, the cover, the header or the watermark, keeps every export a PDF, so the designer offers Markdown only while no such lock is on, and says which to unlock.

A template’s locks go wherever it is used: the one-click exports, the XPress page and the space’s XPress panel. Duplicate copies them too, and the copy is yours to unlock. On their own, they hold for everyone who exports with this template, and people can still pick another template or unlock their own copy. When the settings must hold for everyone in a space, a space admin locks the template in that space, and from then on nobody there can pick another.

What a template covers

Everything around your content:

Control	What it does
Format	PDF, HTML or Markdown. A Markdown template has no page, so the page settings below step aside for it
Paper size	A4, Letter, Legal, A3 - see Page Layout
Orientation	Portrait or Landscape
Margins	Top / Right / Bottom / Left, in millimetres - or Inside / Outside, mirrored for binding
Title sizes	Size, weight and line height for the cover title, page titles and the contents heading - see Page Layout
Cover page	Title, subtitle, which logo it uses, and whether its margins stay empty. With no title typed, the cover carries the document’s own title - see Your Brand
Contents page	A linked table of contents - the exported pages, and optionally the headings inside them
Numbered headings	Each exported page becomes a numbered section, with its own headings numbered beneath
Numbered pictures	Every attached picture captioned Figure 1, 2, 3, using its description text if it has one
Header	Words on the left, in the centre and on the right of the top margin (PDF). See Headers & Footers
Footer	The same three places along the bottom margin (PDF)
Logo (header or footer)	Your site’s logo or its compact mark, in any of those six places (PDF)
Page numbers	On or off, at the top or bottom, as 1, i or I (PDF)
Watermark	Text, position, opacity, rotation, size
File name	What the file is called when it lands. Leave it empty and it takes the page’s title - the cover title when there is a cover
Markdown	How the files are laid out, named and written when a page is exported as Markdown - see Markdown Export

The header, the footer, the watermark and the file name all take placeholders such as {title}, {space} and {date}, so one shared template dates and labels every document correctly without anyone typing it. The header and footer can also name the page each sheet comes from, with {page-title}.

A watermark always prints whole, in the middle of the page or in a corner. When its words, its size and the margins would take it past the edge, it comes out a little smaller instead of losing letters, and the designer’s preview shows it at the size and place it will print. When a watermark with words of its own is locked, or a space requires it, a long {title} is shortened to leave those words room, and the designer says so under the text.

Whatever you choose applies to the whole document - one page or two hundred.

Letting a page pick its own template

A template can name the labels it is for. Put retro on a template, and a one-click export of any page labelled retro uses it - nobody opens the settings, nobody picks anything.

In the designer, Suggest for pages labelled takes a comma-separated list of up to ten labels. They are matched the way Confluence stores them, in lower case, so Retro and retro are the same label. Type each one as it appears on your pages, such as meeting-notes; the designer points out any label it would change or leave out.

A space’s default template still comes first. Only a space admin can set one, which makes it how a space keeps what its documents must carry, a confidential watermark for instance, and no template anyone else creates can step around it. In a space without a default, a matching label decides. A page with no matching label comes out in the template you used last, or in Simple document if you have not picked one yet.

If two labelled templates both match, the first one wins. That is arbitrary, and deliberately so - a page that is both a retro and a report has no right answer, and a scoring rule would make the choice unpredictable instead of merely arbitrary.

Good to know

Templates shape the page around your content. The content itself comes out looking like Confluence: your headings, tables, code blocks, info panels and status lozenges render the way they do on the page, which is usually exactly what you want from an export.

Your identity goes on the furniture around it - the cover, the contents page, page titles and the running header and footer. Set your logo, colours and typefaces once for the whole site and every template picks them up: see Your Brand.

On the way

• The name of whoever ran the export, as a placeholder alongside {title} and {date}.

Want it sooner? Tell us at support@bytera.tech: it moves things up the list.

Next

• Your Brand - the logo, colours and typefaces every template inherits.
• Headers & Footers - the chrome around your pages.
• Page Layout Control - paper, orientation, margins.