Documentation for Confluence 5.4.

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This page explains how you can export individual Confluence pages, blog posts, entire spaces or selections of pages into a single PDF file. 

Exporting single pages

You can export a Confluence page to PDF. This option exports a single page and is available to all users who have permission to view the page.

  • Go to a page in the space and choose Tools > Export to PDF. Follow the prompts to export the page.

Note that the export of a single page to PDF applies any PDF stylesheet customisations, but does not apply any PDF layout customisations. To make your PDF layout customisations apply to a single page exported to PDF, use the 'multiple page' method described below to export that single page only. See Customising Exports to PDF.

Exporting a blog post

You can export a Confluence blog post to PDF. This option exports a single blog post and is available to all users who have permission to view the page.

  • Go to a blog post and choose Tools > Export to PDF. Follow the prompts to export the page.

Blog posts can only be exported individually. Blogs cannot be exported at the space level. 

Exporting multiple pages or the entire space

Using Confluence's space export functionality, you can convert multiple pages or an entire space to PDF.

To use the space export functionality, you need the 'Export Space' permission. See the guide to space permissions.

To export a space or selected pages to PDF:

  1. Go to the space and choose Space tools > Content Tools on the sidebar. 
  2. Choose Export. This option will only be visible if you have the 'Export Space' permission.
  3. Select PDF then choose Next
  4. Decide whether you need to customise the export:
    • Select Normal Export to produce a PDF file containing all the pages that you have permission to view.
    • Select Custom Export if you want to export a subset of pages.
  5. Select the pages you want to export.
    • You have the option to Select All or Deselect All pages.
    • When you select a page, all its child pages will also be selected. Similarly, when you deselect a page all its child pages will also be deselected.
  6. Choose Export.
  7. When the export process has finished, download and save the PDF file as prompted.

If your space uses the Documentation theme:

  1. Choose Browse > Space Operations
  2. Choose PDF Export from the left menu.
  3.  Follow the steps above to export the Space.

Screenshot: Selecting pages to export

Customising the appearance of PDF exports

You can add a title page, a table of contents and customised headers and footers to the PDF output. For more advanced customisations, you can apply Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) modifications. These customisations are specific to each space. You need the 'Space Administrator' permission to be able to apply these customisations. For more information, see Customising Exports to PDF.


  • PDF exports will not handle columns created via the page layout option in the editor. If you have a two- or three-column layout, the PDF export will contain the page content in one single column. The issue is tracked here: CONF-25240 - PDF export does not handle page layouts Resolved
  • Comments on the page are not exported to the PDF file. The screenshot above and Confluence both suggest otherwise, issue is tracked here:  CONF-27811 - Description of PDF Export is incorrect Resolved
  • Only image attachments that have been inserted into a page are included when exporting to PDF.
  • To export a PDF containing international text, you need to install a Unicode font in Confluence.
  • Blog posts can be individually exported, but are not included when you export a space to PDF. 
  • If you have 'Space Administrator' permissions, the link to customise the PDF Stylesheet is provided at the top of the page tree, as shown in the screenshot above.
  • Confluence's PDF export feature is designed to handle a wide variety of content. However, on rare occasions the PDF Export process may fail due to an unrecognised customisation. If that happens the PDF export screen will indicate the title of the page in which the problem occurred, to help you diagnose the cause of the failure.


  1. How do I get the comments on the page to show up in the PDF when I use the export single page icon?

    1. Hi Matt,

      Unfortunately, Confluence does not provide this feature currently. However, we are aware of such needs and there is an improvement request being tracked at the following link:

      The improvement request above suggest Confluence to have the ability to include comments in the page PDF export. If you are keen on this improvement, please cast a vote to increase its popularity and add yourself as a watcher for future updates.

      Choy Li

  2. Anonymous

    This would be really useful.  Does anyone know if it's possible yet?

    1. Hi,

      You may want to give a try by using the Auto-Export plugin that is available in our Confluence Extension space:

      If the above is not an option, you may want to give a try to search for other plugins in our Confluence Extension space which might meet your requirement. Hope the information does help.

      Choy Li

  3. If exporting to PDF, I run into problems if tables or pictures are involved. I created an issue for this on JIRA

  4. Hi,

    is it possible, to store the selection of exported pages for a later re-use?



    1. This would be very handy. Is it possible in 3.0?

  5. Anonymous

    Hi there, we found that when multiple users of the wiki exported an entire space at the same time, the wiki runs very slow...logging in to the wiki just hangs....once the export is finished, speed comes back to there any way to allow space export without running into this adverse performance issue?

    1. I have the same issue - needing visitors to be able to export multiple pages (a particular section of a space) as a pdf.

      The best way to deal with this would seem to be by automating PDF export (with certain supplied parameters) on a regular (e.g. nightly) basis. I read in some comment here (but can't find it now) that (ro-)bot-export of spaces is deliberately discouraged by Atlassian to guard against DDOS-type attacks, but would it be possible to create a local-only bot capable of running these exports according to supplied parameters (regularity, page(s) to include, pdf filename, ...)?

      Bot-exported PDFs could be saved in a certain folder with a known naming structure, and wiki pages could include links to the appropriate pdf file (perhaps via macro), avoiding the whole automatically-generated performance hit issue.

    2. The space backup process consumes some extra resources, hence, it is understandable that Confluence may perform poorly if there's multiple concurrent space export.

      In the context of permission settings, you can assign/drop the "Space - Export" space permission if necessary.

      In regards to a single automated process, I think one can create a job plugins that runs the space export at an interval. You might be able to find better answers in Atlassian Answers.

      1. Thank you for the information - a job plugin (set up to use Cron) sounds exactly like what we need. Then it's just the case of creating the plugin to export specific pages within a space (or the whole space) and save it - all according to designated parameters. Do you know if the plugin architecture allows you to specify a subset of pages to be exported in the space (like is possible in the UI)?

        Another method would seem to be to use an external script using the RPC API - but right now you can only export an entire space as a PDF (but I've voted up a feature request for extra granularity here - see I found a python script that could be modified (currently exports a space as XML)...

        Anyway, I will search the public forums as you suggest ... I just wanted to update this thread with these pointers. Thanks again.

  6. P


    We're using Confluence to create documentation and we use the PDf export mechanism to provide our customers with a PDF version of the documentation.

    Now, in the spaces we use for documentation, we have several pages that have viewing restrictions on them. This can be either pages that are not yet finished or just some internal pages with comments/directions etc.

    I know I can manually uncheck each single page that I do not want to have included before exporting, but I was wondering if it's not possible to run the export in such a way that it will only export what is visible to anonymous users?

    1. Sure - you just need to grant 'Export Space' permission to anonymous users, and then log out before starting the export.

      This will create the PDF including only those pages which are visible to anonymous users.

      If you don't want to enable exports for anonymous users, then you could create a new user, make sure that the permissions are set so that the user does not see your internal pages, and perform your PDF Exports using that restricted user.

      1. P

        Tnx, that'll do the trick. Should have come up with that myself :-)

  7. Anonymous

    I'm new to confluence and need to export a group of pages to a single .pdf file. I need a table oc contents with page numbers in this .pdf. As far as I can see, I can either

    * Export selected files in a space - in which case a TOC with an entry showing the page number of the start of each file is generated automatically and the title page is controlled by the configuration for the space.

    * Assemble a new page using the

    Error rendering macro 'include' : com.atlassian.renderer.v2.macro.MacroException: No page title provided.
    macro to determine what pages to include. I can then export this file either by selecting it from within the space. In this case the filename becomes the title and there is no automatically generated TOC.

    Ideally I want to use the second method as I can then generate customer specific manuals without having to remember which boxes to tick for each manual. Is there a way to extend the 'depth' of the TOC to include headers - to say down to h3 or h4. I can only find fow to turn the feature off in the dicumentation.



    1. Hi George,


      In order to extend the depth, you can use the minLevel and maxLevel parameters in the {toc} macro. For further information regarding the {toc} macro, you might want to read this page.

      However, I would strongly advise you to use the method 1 you have described above rather than method 2 due to some of the current limitations of Confluence. I have also found out some improvement requests that could overcome these limitations in future. Here are the requests:

      Please add yourself as a watcher, vote for these requests and add your own comments to these requests. For further details on how we include new features and improvements, you might want to read this page


      1. Anonymous

        Hi Sashi,

        Apologies for the delay replying, I have had a look at the JIRA items above (and voted for those relevant to my problem), done some more reading and realise I asked the wrong question and what I really want is either:

        * For the {toc} and {toc-zone} macros to include page numbers in a .pdf document or

        * For the 'toc' produced when generating a pdf from multiple confluence files using the 'Export to pdf' under the Advanced tag to include entries (including page numbers) for headers (minLevel and maxLevel should be specified) in addition to the current entries for the start of each file.

        Do you know if this is might be included any time soon?



        1. Anonymous

          Hi Sashi.

          There is a way round this by placingan  entry in the pdf stylesheet. The following will add page numbers to text produced by both {toc} and {toc-zone} macros when printing to .pdf. (provided you get the classname correct) - The classname (rbtoc followed by a 13 digit number which seems to be a 'hash' if the filename) is generated by confluence and can be found by converting to .html and looking at the source. Unfortunately an entry in the pdf stylesheet is needed for each file to be converted. Do you know of an easier way?

          1. I found a nice work-around for this.

            I used the "class"-parameter in toc-zone: 

            Then the following pdf stylesheet works when generating PDF:s from all pages:

            One disadvantage was that style=none stopped to work so I could only have bullet lists as toc, but that could be solved by adding the following to the pdf stylesheet and the global stylesheet (depending on that class=toczone is defined in the toczone-macro):

            1. Mattias thanks for that - it is more elegant than the way I did it - just shows, I really should read the Notation Guide :-)

  8. Anonymous

    The "warning" for the PDF exports says this:

    Due to the hierarchical manner in which a space is exported, Confluence will modify the <hN> tags to generate a uniform appearance for the entire space export.

    This seems to indicate that the space is first exported to a HTML file (with the said transformation) and then converted into PDF. My question: Is this HTML file available afterwards - it is exactly the feature I have been looking for for some time. I do not want the HTML in a package of separate files but in one big HTML file. This would be great!

    Thanks & regards

    1. Anonymous

      Yes, it's located on the in the temp directory of the Confluence installation

  9. when export single page to PDF, a link to other wiki pages is still a link.

    I think this is a bug in terms of choice for default behavior (think anyone that uses confluence as *Intranet* and wants to publish content to outside source)  how to I solve it?

    I looked into a link macro that might have a "nolinkOnPrint" property but cannot find it.

  10. How do I get the page numbers on the pages on the PDF export?

    When I print a whole site (or single page with all its children), the export process gives me this nice little TOC. The unfortunate thing is that the pages themselves have no page numbers. It's great that the TOC tells me that the item I'm looking for is on page 231, but if that's out of 425 pages a TOC doesn't help much.

    Maybe I'm just missing an obvious option someplace?



    1. Hi David,

      You can include page numbers by editing the PDF Stylesheet for the space. Instructions are here.


  11. Anonymous

    Is there a way to export a PDF using SOAP or some other remote service?

    I'd like to call that service from my maven build, so that I can include the last documentation in my build.

    Thanks a lot for any hint.

  12. How can I create an easy link on a Confluence page that will allow them to Export as PDF a select set of pages? I don't want to make new intranet users figure out the multi-step process... How would a URL of this type be structured so that they could just click on my link to accomplish this task quickly and easily? I see that each page/set of pages has a value associated with it, I just don't know what parameters are being passed after I select the pages and then hit the Submit button. Can someone give an example of this?

  13. Like Meg, I'm also looking for a way to provide users with exporting to PDF via a link I put on a page. Anyone?

  14. Anonymous

    Haven't seen this aspect of printing/exporting covered: When you click a "label" you get a nice listing view of all the pages tagged as such. Is there a way then to export or print those pages ... en masse? Thank you.


  15. Anonymous

    Is ist possible to tag part of the content like ("customer" or "internal") within a page and then just export the "customer-tagged" content of the page into the wished format?

    Tank you

    - miriam

  16. I am exporting multiple pages to PDF. Each page contains subsections marked by h4 and h5. Generally, I would expect the table of contents to pick up on these. However, this is not the case. Is there a way in the stylesheet to tell the PDF table of contents to include these subsections? I have no interest in including

    macros on each page in the documentation just the main Table of Contents page after export.

    Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

  17. Anonymous

    I need to export not only a large space, but also any attachements that have been added as part of the site. If i export the file to a pdf it doesnt appear to export the attachedments but mearly make a link back to their original location on the server within confluence. How do i export everything?



  18. Anonymous

    I cannot believe that a user has to have special permission just to achieve the simple task of printing a multi-page article.

  19. Anonymous

    I totally agree with previous comment. I was looking for this functionality and I was surprised that I had to bother the wiki administration for this kind of rights..


    1. Hi there,

      If you'd like to pursue this idea, why not create a feature request on our issue tracker for the Confluence developers?

      I hope this helps.

      Best Regards,

      Edwin Dawson
      Technical Writing Team Leader

  20. Anonymous

    Is it possible to embed a watermark on each page when doing a mult-page PDF export? 


    Dale O.

    1. Anonymous

      as system administrator you can create/modify a css stylesheet where you can probably do so.

  21. Because of insoluble styling problems with HTML export (see HTML export with CSS) I'm having to export individual pages as PDF for upload to a Virtual Learning Environment. This is easy enough, but I have to do it one page at a time which is tedious. Is there a way of export a bunch of pages as individual PDF files, rather than as one big PDF? I suspect not as I can't see any options for this, but if you don't ask you don't get and maybe there's an obscure macro that can do this.


  22. Anonymous

    We want to exclude one column from the pdf but still have it display online. Any idea if that's possible? The column contains links that are irrelevant in print, but, more than that, cover up other text when sent to a pdf.

  23. In the PDF export image little bit zoomed. How to get the same image size as in browser and in PDF?

  24. Anonymous

    How can I export the whole space into doc format instead of pdf?

    1. Anonymous

      I would also like a bulk Word Doc export...

    2. Anonymous

      my impression is that the .pdf translator is more robust than the .doc translator.

      I had tried both for a while, and noticed various rendering problems in the .doc output while the .pdf output was usually fine.

      So I'm a bit surprised about the question and would suggest to keep using pdf.

      If your question is for edting content, up to version 3.5 you can find this under tools, but I believe this doesn't exist for 4.x anymore.

      1. Anonymous

        oh, I may have missed your point. I did save as .html, and then opened the result file using MS-Word.

        As mentioned, the result of doing so was not perfect.

  25. Is it possible to export multiple pages to multiple pdf, so that I get a single pdf for each single Wiki page?

    I don't see any way to do it, I suspect there isn't a standard way.



  26. Anonymous

    Everyone can use "Print to PDF" feature of the internet browser to export to PDF including comments.

  27. With several different sections of a space, doing an export of the content hanges some part of the way through, on a specific page. The progress bar stops, the time elapsed goes up and the time remaining follows it. Removing the offending page allows the rest of the pages to be exported.  I haven't been able to figure out what it is about the offending page – are there any size or content restrictions that are known to cause this kind of failure?

    (And should this have been reported here, or under Get Support, or Report a Bug, or Get Answers?)

    1. Use 'Get Support'.

      The Support Engineers will be able to work with you to identify the root of the problem causing the failure, give you a workaround if possible, identify the steps needed to reproduce the failure, and raise a bug for the developers if necessary.

  28. Anonymous

    Is it possible to display date/time in header/footer when PDF was generated?

  29. Anonymous

    As Fred mentioned above, we want to export each page as it's own PDF, not the entire space into one massive PDF.

    Looking at our Confluence site/space through webdav I see that each page has an @export folder that contain a PDF of the page.  

    Is there an easy single step way to download every .pdf from the @export pages?  I tried sitesucker but the links through webdav have all turned to localhost:8090, so sitesucker can't follow the links to find the pdfs. 

    1. Anonymous

      We are also interested in this.  Have manually copied data from the Export site to PDF page, tweaked it in Excel and Word to produce a list of URLs to extract the individual PDFs from the @export area(s).  I don't want to have to do that every time though.

      The PDFs are already there!!!  Why isn't there a simple button to export the lot/selected sections of a space?   ARG!

  30. Hi All,

    I see that there are many questions on Export to PDF. I'm from itext Software and we are also very satisfied Confluence and JIRA users. We also would like to do more with Export to PDF like for example in EUROPE a lot of Official Documents, like contracts, need to be Digitally Signed with certificates, Electronic ID cards etc...

    The tool that is used by Atlassian Support is iText, our PDF tool. But the version that is used by Atlassian is a very OLD version of iText and it does not contain all the features that are common in 2012, so best is that Atlassian Upgrades to our new version of iText and add the featurs to Confluence, JIRA so that it is a standard feature of Atlassian Products rather than using a Third party Plugin which could cause problems with later updates of Atlassian Products. Feel free to contact us about it. :

  31. The notes say "Blog posts are not included within the PDF export" and cites a feature. We are using 4.3.1 and blog posts are being included in our space PDF exports! Only glitch is there is not currently a way to turn blog exports on or off via the custom export controls.

    1. Hallo Tom

      Thanks for reporting that, and for commenting on the issue (CONF-5599) too. It's very odd. I've just tested the PDF space export in Confluence 5.0-m9 and in Confluence 4.3.3, and it does not include the blog posts in either of those. Perhaps Confluence 4.3.1 is special!

      Cheers, Sarah

      1. Anonymous

        Other special feature on Confluence 4.3.1 seems to be, that excerpt text blocks (on the original page) are shown on pdf documents as heading 1 size font. Is this a style related tweak (can I fix it myself) or could it be bug on plugin? I haven't yet found any reported issues about this, but I have not used much time to search either.

        Cheers, Tommi

  32. Hi,

    I have a page where I get info into menus from database and then the run button displays some charts according to the values chosen from that menus

    when I try to export the page with the charts to PDF, I got all menu items listed (not only the chosen items) and no chart on the PDF file.

    can anybody please help me with that ?

  33. Anonymous


    I've got a problem with the version 3.5.13 and with PDF export. For some reason when I try to export a page that's actually an included page all the contents inside code-blocks are missing in the final PDF. Is this a feature or a bug?


  34. Anonymous

    Two questions:
    1. In Confluence 5, when I export to PDF, all the icons in Note, Tip and Warning boxes are missing. Why is this?
    2. We want to automatically include a page break in the PDF for every H1 and H2. I've added this to the style sheet, but it hasn't worked: 
      page-break-before: always;

      Does anyone know why not?

  35. Anonymous

    It doesn't make sense to me that I need to be given special "Space Permissions" to export pages to PDF for pages within a space that I created.  Shouldn't the creator of any page be able to simply export that page?

  36. Can I forbid to export only one page?

  37. It appears that you have to be a Space Admin to view the Export PDF page (on top of having Space Export permissions.  Is that true?

    Then, how do we allow readers to export a tree or the entire space?

    I saw a comment about allowing Anonymous users to Export Space, but how do they get to the Export PDF menu if they can't open the Space Admin page?

  38. Anonymous

    Can i customize how checklists are exported to PDF? right now the check-box disappears and finished tasks are only slightly grayed. I would prefer striked through or to have the check-box in the pdf.



  39. Anonymous

    How can you include current date and wiki revision on the title page?

  40. Anonymous

    I would also like to know how to include current date and wiki revision on the title page.  thanks!

  41. Anonymous



    How can I export to PDF/Word one or more pages that contain iFrames and links to sub / related pages? We want to leverage the benefits of Confluence and at the same time satisfy our regulatory obligations of providing a complete printable point in time document.

  42. Anonymous

    How can the Title page not be displayed when the page is exported to pdf?

  43. I've got a space with dozens of pages. Is it possible, using either PDF Stylesheet or Layout,  to include the title of each particular page in the generated title page of its PDF export?


  44. Anonymous

    The design of this website is really help me. Besides this information about pdf file is extra ordinary for all. One more website is available which is that gives us easy convert pdf to word.

  45. Anonymous

    Just to recall a previous question that we have also come up with : 


  46. Is there a way we can disable exporting on page level the same way as we can control space level export?

    I need the export option to be available only to Administrators.

  47. Anonymous

    Thank you very much  keep this information I read that  Post and  got it fine and informative.

  48. Hi I wonder can you help - I'm exporting a doc to PDF and some pages contain Gliffy Images with links to internal pages within the doc. HOwever, when I export to PDF the links don't work anymore. Any way around this or is there another plugin I need? 

  49. Hello,

    I need to export my space which has two separate tables.  The problem I am encountering is that the first table's right border does not print and the data is cut off.  It does appear to be wrapping the text, but not fully

    Ex. Sentence 

    "This will allow for use.

    PDF shows



    The second table however, exports perfectly.

    The first step I took when trying to export this originally was to change the orientation to Landscape.  It worked great.  More data was then added to the table.  I then encountered this problem.  I have followed the suggestions that have been posted here and in other sections of this page from table{table-width: 100%} to table{table-width: auto} and so forth.  I did change the margins to .1in and at one point 0.0 in and padding 0em, with no improvement, words are still dumped.

    Any assistance is appreciated.

    1. I figured out that it was not a CSS problem.  I found that text entered as such would cause the table to not display the right border and for the text to lose format when printing or exporting to PDF and Word.  Figured I put that out there in case someone else encounters this.