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
Section titled “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
Section titled “See it before you export”Open the export settings, then Manage → Templates. 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 own pages keep their Confluence styling in the export, and a cover logo appears there rather than in the preview.
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
Section titled “One space, one look, zero effort”Point a space at a template and every one-click export in it - the Export to PDF 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.
Shared, but not fragile
Section titled “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 you like. 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.
What a template covers
Section titled “What a template covers”Everything around your content:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Format | PDF or HTML |
| 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 - 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 text | A line across the top of every page (PDF) - see Headers & Footers |
| Footer text | A line across the bottom (PDF) |
| Page numbers | On or off, in the corner you choose (PDF) |
| Watermark | Text, position, opacity, rotation, size |
| File name | What the file is called when it lands |
The header, the footer, the watermark and the file name all take
placeholders - {title},
{space}, {date} - so one shared template dates and labels every document correctly without
anyone typing it.
Whatever you choose applies to the whole document - one page or two hundred.
Letting a page pick its own template
Section titled “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. Labels are matched the way Confluence stores them, so Meeting Notes and meeting-notes are the same label and case never gets in the way.
This is the most specific answer XPress has, so it comes first: ahead of the space’s default template, which speaks for everything filed in the space, and ahead of the settings the space last used. If a page carries no matching label, nothing changes.
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
Section titled “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
Section titled “On the way”- A logo inside the header or footer - today it goes on the cover page.
- The name of whoever ran the export, as a placeholder alongside
{title}and{date}.
Want either sooner? Tell us at support@bytera.tech - it moves things up the list.
- Your Brand - the logo, colours and typefaces every template inherits.
- Headers & Footers - the chrome around your pages.
- Page Layout Control - paper, orientation, margins.