How do I preserve table column widths in copy paste?

[Stephen Ellwood]

I have a Python program that reads in an Excel sheet and turns it into Word based documentation.  I copy this and paste it into a Confluence page and all the nice table formatting is lost. Specifically, all of the columns are the same width in Confluence; the width of the source is lost. This worked perfectly in Mindtouch, our previous Wiki. There are over 100 tables in the output and I had to spend nearly half an hour manually re-adjusting the tables so they looked the same.

I also tried to save the word file as HTML. The HTML looked great.  The copy-pasted Confluence page not so much. Can anyone shed some light on how this might be done.  As far as I can tell I cannot paste raw HTML into the page.  Again Mindtouch, which is 10 years older than Confluence allowed me to edit the HTML with a single push button then copy-paste raw HTML in there.

[Stephen Ellwood · Accepted solution]

I have now rewritten my Python to write pages directly via the RES API using the Atlassian confluence.py library:

https://atlassian-python-api.readthedocs.io/confluence.html 

Even then I had to write the page as an Editor V1 page. When I write it as an editor V2 file the column widths are lost in exactly the same way as the copy-paste from word.  This is a severe limitation of the latest incarnation of Confluence and this user is unhappy with Confluence at this point.

The markup used is not HTML.  Confluence clearly felt the need to reinvent the wheel here and ended up with a square one. For other users benefit, the markup language is shown here::

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-wiki-markup-251003035.html

Many of the normal features of HTML are simply not there, giving very little control over the look-and-feel of the page.  I had to fudge the table column widths using extensive preprocessing of the data including adding non-breakable spaces to the table titles using trial and error.

[Prince Nyeche]

Hi @Stephen Ellwood 

Welcome to community! On Cloud I don't think it allows raw HTML to be added directly. If it was on markdown most probably it can render it but HTML, it will most definitely strip it out. 

[Stephen Ellwood]

Thanks for the answer.  To be clear, I don't want to have to use html, I would rather that the word importer preserves all of the formatting in the source.  Since I can do it manually it is clearly possible to create a Confluence page that looks the way I want, its just that I have not found a way yet of doing it automatically.

[Prince Nyeche]

Hi, you can look into using API to do what you want?

[Stephen Ellwood]

Where would I find the documentation on the API?

[Prince Nyeche]

Hi, I already gave a link to the docs in my previous response.

[Stephen Ellwood]

Apologies, did not see the blue in the black :o)

[Stephen Ellwood]

I have taken a look at the API but its not immediately obvious how to write a table into a page and how to encode the page widths.  This is a week's work at least to get up to speed with so does not solve my problem in the short term.