Prevent WSIWYG Editor applying undesired text styles

[M.S.]

I like the confluence WSIWYG editor and we are using it to produce documentation. However, the editor seems to have the annoying habit of applying undesired text styles quite randomly.

Most of the time, the additional styling is not directly visible but when you inspect the raw wiki code, then you would find loads of <span style="...">...</span> elements. Most of the time, these apply font-size and line-height attributes.

While in most cases, the applied attributes match the default text attributes (and are therefore not directly visible), we have situations where the attributes make the text just look somewhat off (applying 14pt or 10pt where the text is actually 12pt).

Is there any workaround to prevent this from happening. I keep cleaning up larger texts using the wiki source code editor plugin, which surfaces this clutter, but that is extremely annoying.

[M.S. · Accepted solution]

We are on version 5.1.5. And yes, the editor keeps inserting these without users choosing font color.

It is pretty annoying. As stated above, I use the wiki source editor to cleanup and have actually written a small script that eliminates the undesired spans.

The issue is not that much with looking at the articles on the screen. Specifically when we start to export the content to Word (using the very nice k15t plugin), then this surfaces the undesired spans - not a fault of the plugin, it just makes them visible.

So there is no true solution, other than hoping that Atlassian will improve the editor.

[Steffen Heller]

Are you sure it happens randomly? I know that styles like this are applied when you choose a font color and this can easily happen unintentionally.

For more info it would be helpful to know which version of confluence you use because the editor has changed with the different versions.

[Matthew J. Horn]

Yup, this is a common problem with the visual editor. Extraneous spans and divs are added in all over the place, especially when you do copy/paste actions in the editor.

There is no workaround, but you can clean it up with the Source Editor plugin:

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

It's a free plugin that lets you get at the source of the page (when you're editing it). You can go in and remove all kinds of extra cruft and then save the page out.

It's a little clunky, but it works, and it's great for when you have really complex pages that don't seem to render quite right.

hth,

matt