Page Layout Control

A document that prints wrong is a document nobody uses. XPress lets you set the paper, the orientation and each margin independently, and save all of it into a template so you only decide once.

Where to set it

Layout belongs to a template. Press Templates at the top of the XPress page and open the Page section. Paper, orientation and margins sit together there with the live preview beside them, so you change a margin and watch the page move.

For a one-off change that should not affect the template, use Adjust for this export.

Paper size

Size	Millimetres	Good for
A4	210 × 297	The default nearly everywhere
Letter	216 × 279	North America
Legal	216 × 356	Long-form legal documents
A3	297 × 420	Wide tables, diagrams, architecture drawings
A5	148 × 210	Booklets, handouts and quick reference cards
A2	420 × 594	Posters, plans and wall charts
A size of your own	Any, from 50 to 1000	A format your print shop or your brand calls for

Choose A size of your own and type its Width and Height in millimetres; landscape turns it on its side like any other. A4, Letter, Legal, A3 and A5 stay one click away on the space page, and a template on A2 or its own size keeps that size there too.

Orientation

Portrait for anything text-led. Landscape when the content is wider than it is tall - tables with many columns, timelines, diagrams.

Landscape plus A3 is the widest canvas XPress offers. The Wide (landscape) starter gives you landscape with tight margins on A4 - switch its paper size to A3 when you need the extra width.

Margins

Top, right, bottom and left, each set on its own, in millimetres. Defaults are 15 mm top and bottom, 12 mm left and right.

Two things to keep in mind:

Headers, footers and page numbers print inside the margins. Tight margins leave them crowded against your content, and a logo comes out smaller. If you use them, keep 15-20 mm top and bottom. See Headers & Footers.
A wide table needs room, not margin. Tables always fit the page, and narrower left and right margins give their columns more of it.

Combinations worth stealing

For	Paper	Orientation	Margins
Standard internal document	A4	Portrait	20 mm all round
Printed and bound	A4	Portrait	25 mm, with 35 mm on the left for the gutter
Wide data tables	A3	Landscape	10 mm all round
Slide-style handout	A4	Landscape	15 mm all round

The size of your titles

A cover title that fills the page is right for a report and much too loud for meeting notes. Each template sets its own, so you are not choosing once for everything you ever export.

Three things carry a size of their own, and each takes a size, a weight and a line height:

	Where you see it
Cover title	The large title on a cover page
Page title	The heading at the top of every exported page
Contents heading	The word above your contents list

Leave a line height blank and it goes back to its default, which the empty field shows: 1.2 for the cover title and the page title, and Auto for the contents heading, which then takes the spacing of the text around it.

The preview shows every change as you make it - and if a title grows large enough to push a cover onto a second sheet, the preview says so rather than quietly showing you a page that fits.

Headings and text in your pages

Out of the box your pages keep Confluence’s own look, so they read the way their author wrote them. When a document has to look like your company’s, In your pages under Typography gives your pages a house style:

	What you can set
Body text	Size and line height of paragraphs and lists, in tables too unless the table style sets its own size; justified text, the paragraph spacing and one of your brand colours, outside tables
Heading 1, 2 and 3	Size, weight, one of your brand colours, and whether each starts on a new page
Heading 4, 5 and 6	Size, weight and one of your brand colours
Links	One of your brand colours, always underlined or never
Tables	Header cells in a brand colour, every other row shaded, lines between rows or none, compact or roomy cells, text in the middle of its row, and the text size
Lists	The numbers of six levels (1, a, A, i, I) and the bullets (round, ring, square), in your brand accent if you like
Panels and code	Info, Note, Success, Warning and Error panels with a line down the left, colour without a frame or a frame without colour, all in your brand accent, with or without icons; code blocks on light grey or a shade of your accent, at their own text size; code in a line of text on light grey or a shade of your accent, in one of your brand colours
Status and mentions	Status labels as a frame or as the word alone in its colour; mentions of people as a plain name or in your accent
Horizontal rules	One of your brand colours and a thickness from 1 to 6 px

Every field starts empty, which means as Confluence has it, and only what you fill in changes. Start on a new page turns each Heading 1 into a chapter on a sheet of its own. A heading that opens its page stays under the page title, a heading right under another heading stays with it, and a heading inside a table cell or a layout column stays in its row. In two columns headings stay in their column. The typefaces come from Your Brand.

Tables in your colours

A table with its header in your brand colour and a light shade on every other row is a table a reader follows across the page without a ruler. Under Tables, pick the header colour and the header text follows on its own, white on a dark colour and dark on a light one. A cell its author coloured in Confluence keeps that colour, so a red Blocked still shouts. Page Properties tables take the same style, and on paper a long table still repeats its header row on every sheet.

Panels and code in your colours

Callouts are where a document says careful and good to know, and they can say it in your colours. Give every Info, Note, Success, Warning and Error panel a line down the left, a soft colour without a frame, or a frame without colour, and put them all in your brand accent if one colour per kind is more than your document needs. A panel in a colour its author picked keeps it. Code blocks take a light grey or a shade of your accent, and a text size of their own.

Links, labels and the small things

The small things are what make a page look finished. Links can take your accent and an underline, so a reader holding paper still sees what was a link. Code in a line of text gets a quiet shade of its own. Status labels can drop their filled boxes and keep their colour as a word, so a red BLOCKED still reads red, and a mention of a person reads as a name rather than a button. Justified text, the spacing between paragraphs and horizontal rules in your colour finish the look. Text in a table keeps its own colour and alignment, and a paragraph its author aligned keeps its alignment.

Body text columns sets a PDF’s text in two columns, the way an info sheet or a newsletter reads. Tables, code and panels still take the full width of the page, so nothing has to squeeze into half of it, and a picture in a paragraph fits its column. An HTML export keeps one column, because a screen scrolls.

Layouts in columns, one under another

A page laid out in two or three columns in Confluence reads well on a wide screen and cramped on A5 paper or a phone. Page layouts in columns under Typography keeps them side by side, as in Confluence, or prints each column under the one before it, at the full width of the page. PDF and HTML alike.

Printing it double-sided

A document meant to be printed on both sides and bound needs its wide margin on the bound edge - which is the left of one page and the right of the next. Set it once and let it alternate.

Switch on Mirror the margins for double-sided printing and the two side margins stop being Left and Right. They become Inside and Outside: inside is the bound edge, outside is the one you hold. The inside margin swaps sides on every page, so the binding never eats a line of text.

Page 1 is the right-hand page of an open book, so it keeps the margins exactly as you set them; it is the backs of the sheets that move.

The header and footer move with the margin too. Whatever sits on the left or the right, words, your logo or the page number, trades sides on every other page, so a page number on the outer edge is always under the reader’s thumb. See Bound documents.

One layout per document

Whatever you choose applies to the whole export - every page, whether it is one page or two hundred. You cannot mix paper sizes or orientations inside a single file. If a document needs both, export the wide part separately.

Every page starts fresh

In PDF, each exported page begins on a new sheet, so a bulk export reads as a document with sections rather than one continuous run. Cover and contents pages get their own sheets too.

Many short pages read better as one run, a set of meeting notes or a glossary say. Switch off Each page starts on a new sheet under Typography and the pages follow one another, each title a little below the end of the page before. The cover and the contents page keep their own sheets, and a header or footer that names the page or prints one of its facts still starts each page on a new sheet, so what it prints is the right page’s.

Steer the export from the page

Some decisions belong to the page, not to the template: a table that must not split across two sheets, a note for the team that has no place in the printed document, a disclaimer only the PDF needs. XPress adds five macros to the editor for them. Type /XPress on a page and pick one:

XPress keep together keeps the words inside it on one sheet. When they would split, they move to the next sheet whole; words longer than a sheet still flow on.
XPress hide in the export shows its words on the page and leaves them out of the export, headings, pictures and index terms included, so the contents page never lists them.
XPress show only in the export prints its words in the export and shows a short note in their place on the page.
XPress page break starts a new sheet where it sits. In an export whose pages run on, end a page with it to start the next page on a new sheet; at the very top of a page it changes nothing.
XPress landscape pages prints the words inside it on sheets turned sideways, the place for a wide table or a timeline, and the pages after it go back to the template’s own way round. On the turned sheets, a header or footer that names the page or prints one of its facts names the document instead. A watermark in front of the text keeps its place on every sheet, upright or turned.

They work with every template. HTML and Markdown exports leave hidden words out and print the words meant for the export too; keeping together, page breaks and landscape sheets belong to the PDF. Confluence’s own Word export also leaves hidden words out and prints the words meant for the export.

Hiding shapes the export; it does not lock anything away. Everyone who can read the page still sees the hidden words in Confluence, and the words shown only in the export are part of the page for its readers too. A Markdown export that saves the page’s attachments saves every one of them, a file shown only among hidden words included. Keep anything confidential on a page only the right people can open.

Words before and after each page

Some things belong on every page of a document: who owns it, when it last changed, how it is classified, where to send questions. Under Page, Before and after each page puts your words under each page’s title and after its content, in every page you export, PDF and HTML alike.

They take the placeholders the cover takes and each page’s own besides: {page-title}, {page-author}, {page-created}, {page-modifier}, {page-modified}, {page-version} and {page-url}. A line reading Written by {page-author} · Last changed {page-modified:d MMMM yyyy} gives every page its own author and date. The same buttons as on your own pages make words bold, italic, a link or a list, and Logo puts your logo or compact mark beside the words, and a link can lead to the page itself in Confluence: [Open this page in Confluence]({page-url}) takes a reader of the PDF straight back to where it lives, and {url} to the document’s first page.

Choose how they look: small, quiet words; a light box in your accent with a bar down its side; or ruled off from the page. A page that is only a title opens its section and has none.

Pages by their labels

A template can choose its pages by their Confluence labels. Under Contents, Pages by their labels keeps Only pages with one of these labels, or Every page but those with one of these labels; type the labels separated by commas or spaces. Export a whole tree with a template that leaves out draft and internal, and the document carries only what is ready to share. With no labels typed, Only pages with one of these labels keeps no page, and Every page but those keeps every page.

The filter chooses pages, not what is inside them: a kept page that includes a left-out page with an Include Page or Excerpt Include macro still prints what it includes.

Labels decide what leaves Confluence, so XPress plays it safe: a page whose labels it cannot read in full is left out, whichever way the template chooses. When the labels keep no page of what you selected, the export says so straight away.

How much the contents lists

By default a contents page lists the pages you exported. For a long document that is a map of the covers, not of the contents.

How much the contents lists opens it up:

The exported pages - one line each. The default, and what every template did before.
Pages and their headings - each page’s own top-level headings underneath it.
Pages and two levels of headings - one level further in.
Pages and three levels of headings, Pages and four levels of headings and Pages and every heading - all the way down to Heading 6, for a manual whose reader looks a section up on paper.

Most documents read best with one or two levels; the deeper ones are there when the detail is the point. Where your sections are numbered, a heading below Heading 3 carries no number, in the contents just as on the page.

Indent of each level sets how far each level stands in from the one above, in millimetres. Leave it empty for the usual step, or set 0 for a flat list.

Your page’s first heading is listed whether you wrote it as Heading 1 or Heading 2, for the same reason the numbering treats them alike.

Every entry is a link, so a reader clicks straight to the section. In a PDF each entry also carries the number of the page it starts on, with a dotted line leading to it, so the document works just as well printed and stapled as it does on screen. Page numbers beside each entry turns them off when you would rather keep the plain list. An HTML export has no pages, and a template that numbers its pages in Roman numerals or letters keeps the plain list too, so there the entries are links alone.

The contents page is called Table of Contents unless you call it something else: Contents page title takes the words your readers expect, Inhalt or Sommaire or What’s inside.

A page that carries Confluence’s own Table of Contents macro lists its headings again, right under the document’s contents page. Switch on Leave out the contents lists inside pages and the document keeps one contents page, yours.

A page that opens with a heading saying what its title already says prints those words twice. Leave out a first heading that repeats the page title keeps the title and drops the heading, so the contents lists the page once. A heading that holds a link, a picture or an emoji stays. A page that holds nothing but its repeated title becomes a section heading in your document.

A Gallery macro prints its pictures side by side, sized to fit the page; switch on Gallery pictures one under another and each takes a line of its own at its own size. A PDF, Word, Excel or PowerPoint file shown on the page with the View File macro prints as a neat card with the file’s kind and name, linked to it in Confluence.

A Page Tree macro prints as the list it shows in Confluence: the pages under its root, in Confluence’s own order (or by title, when the macro sorts that way), as many levels deep as it opens, each one a link that stays inside the document when the page is in your export. You see only the pages you can open in Confluence.

Two more things a page carries for Confluence rather than for a reader can stay behind too. Leave out the lists of child pages takes out the list a Children Display macro draws, whatever it lists, and the pages a Page Tree macro would list; one set to show its pages as headings stays, and a page that holds nothing but such a list becomes a section heading in your document. Leave out Page Properties tables takes out the table that feeds a report in Confluence, while {property:Name} still reads it for your cover and header.

Links that still work on paper

A link to another page or heading in the same document is one click on screen, and nothing at all once the document is printed. That holds for the smart links Confluence makes of a pasted page address too: one to a page in the document leads inside it, and shows the page’s title rather than its address. Switch on Page numbers after links inside the document and every such link carries the page it leads to: Installation (see page 12). The numbers come from the document as it prints. Words before the number takes siehe Seite or voir page for a document in another language. Like the contents page’s numbers, this is for PDF only, with the pages numbered 1, 2, 3.

Links that leave the document, to a website or to a Confluence page you did not export, can come along to paper too. Switch on Addresses of links that leave the document and each one carries a small number, with its full address listed at the end of its page, numbered on through the whole document. A mention of a person and a link that already shows its own address are left as they are. For PDF.

A document for readers who cannot open your Confluence should not invite them to try. Links that leave the document prints the links Confluence made to its pages, blog posts and files you did not export as plain words, or every link in your pages that leaves the document, websites too, in PDF and HTML alike. With the addresses switched on as well, each keeps its number and its address below: the way a printed book cites. Links inside the document stay links, a mention of a person keeps its look, and the links in your own words, around each page or on your own pages, stay links.

Numbering the pictures

Switch on Number the pictures and every attached picture gets a caption beneath it - Figure 1, Figure 2 - running in order through the whole document.

If a picture has description text in Confluence, that becomes the caption: Figure 3. The request path. Without one it is just the number, which is still what a paragraph refers to when it says “see Figure 3”.

Word before the number writes the caption in your document’s language: Abbildung 3, Illustration 3, Exhibit 3.

Emoji are left alone. They arrive as pictures too, and a document whose smileys are captioned Figure 4 is not a document.

With a contents page, List the pictures after the contents adds a page that lists every numbered picture with its caption and the page it is on, so a reader looking for the architecture diagram finds it in a glance. Title of the list gives it your heading, Abbildungsverzeichnis or Table des illustrations. In a PDF numbered 1, 2, 3 each line carries its page number, as the contents page does; in HTML each line is a link. The lists follow the contents page unless you move them, to the back of the document for instance, in the order of the sections.

Numbering tables and code blocks

Switch on Number the tables and every table gets a caption, Table 1, Table 2, running in order through the whole document, so a paragraph can say “see Table 4” and mean it. A table inside another table counts as part of it.

Number the code blocks does the same for code: Listing 1, with the block’s own title beside the number when it has one, Listing 2. Deploy script.

Word before a table’s number and Word before a code block’s number write the captions in your document’s language: Tabelle 3, Quelltext 2. Captions of tables and code puts them above the block, the default, or below it.

With a contents page, List the tables after the contents and List the code blocks after the contents each add a page after the contents, and after the list of pictures where there is one: every numbered table with the section it sits in, every code block with its title, or the section it sits in when it has none, and in a PDF numbered 1, 2, 3 the page each one is on. Title of the table list and Title of the code list give them your headings, Tabellenverzeichnis or Code listings.

A list of your equations

Formulas written with LaTeX Math carry the numbers their authors gave them, and the text refers to those numbers: “as equation (3) shows”. So XPress keeps them exactly as written and never numbers a formula itself.

With a contents page, List the numbered equations after the contents adds a page that lists every formula with a number, by that number, with the page it sits in and, in a PDF numbered 1, 2, 3, the page it lands on. Formulas without a number stay out of the list. Title of the equation list gives it your heading, Formelverzeichnis or Equations.

Numbering the sections

A document people cite in a meeting is a document with numbers in it. “It’s in 4.2” is a sentence somebody can act on; “it’s in the bit about retention, further down” is not.

Switch on Number the headings and each exported page becomes a numbered section, with its own headings numbered beneath it:

1. Release Notes 4.2
   1.1 Highlights
   1.2 Compatibility
2. Architecture Overview
   2.1 Request path
       2.1.1 Validation

The numbers run through the whole document, so section 2 follows section 1 no matter how many sheets the first one took.

Your page’s first heading gets one number, whether you wrote it as Heading 1 or Heading 2. Confluence keeps a page’s title outside its body, so people use one or the other for their top level and it would be unhelpful to punish the choice - either way, your first heading is 1.1 rather than 1.1.1. Three levels of numbering, then it stops; a fourth number tells a reader nothing they did not already know from the indentation.

Numbering works in HTML exports too.

Numbers in your house style

A handbook reads in chapters, a contract in sections, and the numbers can say so. Under Number the headings, choose for each level (the page titles, Heading 1 and 2, Heading 3) how it counts: 1, 2, 3, I, II, III, i, ii, iii, A, B, C, a, b, c, or no number at all. Add words before and after the number, and pick whether a heading shows the levels above it or only its own number:

Chapter I: Release Notes 4.2
   I.1 Highlights
       I.1.a) Upgrades
Chapter II: Architecture Overview
   II.1 Request path

The contents page numbers its entries the same way, so Chapter II in the contents is Chapter II on the page. The designer shows an example line as you type, and the preview follows along.

An index at the end

A printed manual earns its keep when a reader can look a term up. Mark a term where it matters with Confluence’s own Anchor macro, named index: and the term, such as index: Export pipeline, and switch on An index at the end. Every marked term is listed once, from A to Z, grouped by letter, with the pages it is on: in a PDF numbered 1, 2, 3 the page numbers themselves, on screen a link named after each page. Title of the index gives it your heading, Stichwortverzeichnis or Index.

Mark the same term on several pages and the index lists each of them; mark it twice on one page and that page is listed once. An anchor with any other name is an anchor and nothing more. The index comes after your pages unless you move it in the order of the sections.

Finding your way around a long one

Every PDF carries bookmarks: each exported page is an entry, and its own headings sit nested underneath. Two hundred pages becomes something you move around in rather than scroll through, and it works in every PDF reader worth the name. Nothing appears on the printed page: bookmarks live in the reader, not on the paper.

Three settings under Template, beside the document properties, shape them:

Bookmarks - every heading, the pages only, or the pages and their headings down to the level you choose. A manual with deep headings keeps a short, readable list.
Bookmarks open on opening - every level open, or closed so only the pages show, or open down to a level. Readers unfold the rest with a click.
Show the bookmarks when the PDF opens - readers that honour it open with their bookmarks panel showing, so a long document starts with its map.

Your Brand - the logo, colours and typefaces every template inherits.
Headers & Footers - what goes in those margins.
Export Templates - save a layout and reuse it.