Exporting Confluence Documentation for Clients

Most Confluence documentation is written for people who can open the space. Plenty of it still ends up with people who can't: clients receiving a project handover, stakeholders reviewing a spec, or partners being onboarded.

Confluence's built-in export can produce a PDF, and space admins can brand space exports with HTML and CSS. It doesn't offer a ready-made client format that anyone on the team can pick at export time, and single-page exports don't get the custom title page, header or footer. (Here's the full picture.)

This guide shows how to export consistent, branded client PDFs with PDF Exporter for Confluence.

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The Setup: An Admin Creates a Template, Everyone Uses It

Consistency comes from templates. An admin creates a "Client Deliverable" template once. After that, anyone exporting for a client selects it from the template dropdown and gets the same cover, header and layout without touching any settings.

Admin step (once):

1. Go to Confluence Settings → PDF Exporter and click New Template
2. Name it "Client Deliverable"
3. Configure it as described below
4. Save

User step (each export):

1. Open the page, or the parent page of the section to export
2. Click Export to PDF under the page title, or choose Export to PDF from the ••• menu
3. Tick the pages to include in the page tree
4. Select the "Client Deliverable" template
5. For more than one page, choose One merged PDF or Separate PDFs (ZIP)
6. Export

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Recommended Template Settings for Client PDFs

Cover page

Turn on Add cover page. Corporate (left-aligned with a solid accent bar) and Executive (thin accent line, refined type) suit most client documents. Set the accent color to your brand color and upload your logo. If you need an exact brand layout, build one in the Custom cover designer.

The subtitle and author are template settings, not something you type per export. Use variables so they stay correct without editing, for example a subtitle of Updated {date} and an author of Prepared by {lastEditedBy}. If a client needs their name on the cover, create a template for that client. Details are in How to Add a Cover Page to Confluence PDF Exports.

Header

Turn on the header with your company name or {title}, centered. It appears on every content page, so pages still identify their source if printed on their own.

Footer and page numbers

Put a confidentiality line in the footer on the left, and page numbers on the right in the Page 1 of 10 format:

Confidential · Company Name                                    Page 1 of 10

Header text and footer text each have one position (left, center or right). Page numbers are a separate setting with their own position.

Watermark

For drafts under review, create a separate "Client Draft" template with a "DRAFT" watermark at about 0.15 opacity. Keeping drafts and finals in separate templates means nobody has to remember to switch the watermark off.

Table of contents and page breaks

Turn on the table of contents at depth 2 (H1 and H2) for anything longer than a few pages. Turn on Break before H1 so each major section starts on a new page, and Break before H2 for long documents.

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Common Export Scenarios

Project handover package

A handover usually spans several pages: architecture overview, runbooks, configuration guides, contacts.

1. Open the exporter from the parent page of the handover section
2. The parent is ticked with its children. Untick any internal-only pages.
3. Select "Client Deliverable"
4. Choose One merged PDF to send one document with one table of contents, continuous page numbers and links between pages that work inside the PDF
5. Export

Choose Separate PDFs (ZIP) instead if the client wants each document as its own file. The ZIP holds one PDF per page, all at the top level.

Technical specification

1. Open the spec page and click Export to PDF under the title
2. Select "Client Deliverable" and check the live preview
3. Export

With a table of contents and page breaks before H1, a long spec is easy to navigate without Confluence.

Recurring status report

Update the Confluence page, export it with the same template, and send it. The cover, header and layout stay the same every time. With {date} in the subtitle, the date updates on its own.

Full documentation set

For a client receiving a whole documentation space, open Apps → PDF Exporter for Confluence, tick the top-level pages in the tree, untick internal-only pages, choose the template and an output, and export.

Compliance submissions

Exports for audits and regulators have their own requirements: status watermarks, archive snapshots and your own export records. See How Compliance Teams Export Confluence Content to PDF.

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Before You Send

1. For a single page, check the live preview in the export dialog. For multi-page exports, preview one representative page first, then open the downloaded PDF.
2. Confirm the cover subtitle and author read correctly
3. Confirm the watermark is absent on final documents, or present on drafts
4. In a merged PDF, click a few table of contents entries and check the page numbering

A couple of minutes here catches the problems a client would notice: a leftover watermark, the wrong template or a missing logo.

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Install PDF Exporter for Confluence

Read the documentation