akazatchkov / stower

Now that the workaround of editing in word is no longer available, could we reopen this ticket for further review? I'm experiencing this issue with Confluence Server v7.4 and looking for either a fix or even a current workaround. I've tried everything within this string with no luck. Thanks so much for any assistance you're able to provide!

I have just run into what seems to be a similar issue in Confluence version 6.15.10 affecting graphical elements created by Confluence macros (tip, warning, info, note)  that are not being exported to Word  - neither the icon itself nor the highlight color and text box. I do not know if this has anything to do with permissions as discussed above - I don't get any warnings or prompts to log in.

Issue is still present in Confluence Cloud. How can I get images to appear in my downloaded Word files?

Hi kishsrini

Thanks for getting in touch. It looks like this may have regressed at some point. I've created CONF-34211 to track this as a separate issue.

Regards
Steve Haffenden
Confluence Bugmaster
Atlassian

I'm seeing this issue (or one like it) in Confluence 5.5.2.

This is not fixed in our Confluence Installation (Version 4.3.7). And the Workaround is not possible in version 4.x. What now? Is this fixed in Confluence 5.x?

This workaround doesn't work on Confluence v5, is there another solution?

the "work-around" does not exist in Confluence 4.x anymore

There are also problems with images from included pages (CONF-26368) and Confluence icons (CONF-26367).

Note that Word for Mac is still unable to display images in Word page exports (CONF-26352).

jfb, I have created a separate issue to track this problem: CONF-25599

This is not fixed, at least not for the images generated by plugins.

Fixed??!!

We should have some kind of party - this must be the longest standing issue of all time!

I can't wait to try this new feature out

Hi guys,

We are working on this problem and if everything goes as expected this will be fixed in Confluence 4.2.

This has never worked for our environment. Perhaps it is because of the reason you have provided, but allowing anonymous access is not a workable configuration change for our management.

Confluence should automatically add the complete URL for the server and graphic(s) so that the export to word functionality works correctly.

The workaround in described here does not seem to work in the current version of Confluence as there is no "Tools -> Edit in Word" option.
On the pages there is only a "Tools -> Export to Word" option.

When we use the "Export to Word" feature (via Tools-Export to Word), images that are included in a confluence page are not shown in the generated word document. The document only shows a broken link message where the image should be.

We are using Confluence 4.1.
The Office Connector plugin (version 2.0.15) and the option "Allow authentication tokens in the URL path" is activated.

Opening the generated doc file with a text editor reveals that the src attributes of the image tags don't contain the server base url (protocol & server name). Nor do the urls in the src attributes contain any kind of authentication tokens as the "Allow authentication tokens in the URL path" of the Office Connector indicates.

Example for an image tag generated by the Export to Word feature:
<img class="confluence-embedded-image" width="500" src="/confluence/download/attachments/688130/image2012-1-5+10%3A34%3A12.png?version=1&modificationDate=1325756053000" data-image-src="/confluence/download/attachments/688130/image2012-1-5+10%3A34%3A12.png?version=1&modificationDate=1325756053000" title="image2012-1-5 10:34:12.png">

When we configure read-only access for anonymous users and modify the generated file to include the protocol and server name in the src attributes of the image tags, word will display the images correctly.

The workaround (Office Connector for Confluence) does not work for Confluence 4.0. Is there any hope for this issue and the latest version of Confluence?

Updated the workaround to include the proper link. Plus, grammar fixes!

Yes, an update would be apreciated...

Hm, 5 years and still no way out of this - any news perhaps?

I've upgraded to 3.5.2. We were looking to leverage this feature after switching from Sharepoint. It's disappointing to see an advertised feature fail to export correctly:

Export pages
Want to share your page with someone outside of wiki? Quickly export individual pages to Word or PDF formats.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/full-features.jsp
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Exporting+to+a+Word+document

Please resolve this issue at your nearest convenience.

We just upgrade to Confluence 3.3.3, and the problem still exists. When can we expect this issue to be resolved?

A walkaround that looks as if it works.
If you import the page from word it will export with images, and if you put the image in a colomn it will also export fine
Eg

I have used IE and office 07.

Hi all,

You might be interested in our new Scroll Office plugin, which creates native Word 2007/2010 files from one ore more Confluence pages. Scroll Office not only properly embeds images in the outputted Word files, but also supports all kind of Word functionality to style the Word files (page headers/footers, title pages, multiple columns, styles, etc.).

More Info: http://k15t.com/display/web/Scroll+Office
Online Demo: http://k15t.com/demo/display/OFFICEDEMO/Home (we also provide free 30-day evaluation licenses)
Forums: http://support.k15t.com/forums/181312-scroll-office (feedback, feature requests etc)

-Stefan

Sorry, I forgot to mention: I have tested this with Word 11.6568.6568 SP2, which should correspond to Word 2003 running on Windows XP professional. Have you tested this using a browser? Maybe it requires specific internet security settings I am not aware of.

@Ferdi, which version of Word does it work with? I tried this os_authType=basic with Word 2007 and no login box appeared.

We have recently "discovered" this bug ourselves and managed to come up with the following workaround, which I believe has not been mentioned before:

Since the problem lies in Word not being able to cope with a form-based authentication challenge you have to trick Confluence to force Word to perform authentication. This can be achieved by for example adding an image to the top of the attachment and manipulate the url with which is accessed.

Eg. Say we want to use this link http://confluence.atlassian.com/download/attachments/139509/PDF_icon.gif?version=1&modificationDate=1150350600886

Then add os_authType=basic& directy after the ?

Getting: http://confluence.atlassian.com/download/attachments/139509/PDF_icon.gif?os_authType=basic&version=1&modificationDate=1150350600886

This forces Confluence to respond to the client with a basic-authentication challenge

Now add the latter url as an image to your page and save it.
If you export and load the exported document in word you will get a pop-up box asking for authentication. Fill in your confluence credentials.

Now Word has logged in it apparently receives a cookie and use it in subsequent requests, as now, all (I tested the graph macro and a regular image link) images will be displayed.

After that you can embed the images by saving them inside the document (Edit->Links)

Now I would favor embedded images by default. However, a quick fix (hopefully) would be to add the os_authType variable in the urls inside the exported Word document.

That's about as far as I got. This may not work in all environments, but I hope this helps.

Good luck fixing this!

Regards,

Ferdi

well good to know that atlassian still looks in these kind of old issue

Doc clients does not render embedded base64 images (from image tag).

Just a quick update

As per my comments on CONF-20263.

We are still investigating a solution for this fix:

The issue may be two fold where word attempts to get the image in a separate request (which subsequently fails due to authentication issues).

To work around this I have written some code to test if we could embed the image as embedded base64 representation of the binary.

<IMG SRC="data:image/gif;base64,RAAAtuhhx4dbgYKAAA7...more data....."

This was unsuccessful. (see screenshot) - Word should (like IE/Firfox) render the embeeded image but it does not.

The current work around is to "Edit in Word" -> and then save the document in word on your local hard drive.

The next steps is to see if we can implement via WordML.

That's the update.

@Ramon ... this bug is a little older than two years old ... it's been kicking about since 2006!

I still don't understand why serialising a plugin resource is any different to serialising an attachment or generated image (eg Chart)

But hey, I've suggested that before so evidently there is something going on here that I don't understand?

We are using Confluence 3.1.2 with Office Connector Plugin v1.6.2. This is still a problem: we do not see the graphics that were on the wiki page when 'Export to Word' is selected from the menu. The result is that the page is exported with a 'red X box' in the place where the image or graphics should be displayed.

In addition, if we select 'Export to PDF' all graphics and images are displayed correctly.

Please fix or send a workaround.

Unfortunately this bug is still around, we have adopted Jira for our team and it is causing problems. We need to export the issues quickly, with the attached images to show business stakeholders on demand which is proving slightly difficult. It looks like we will have to explore workarounds and other options but I feel this feature would benefit many others.

this problem still exisits today
a 2 year old bug

Even better than using the office connector would be for confluence to actually embed the images, there exists code in there for it to take generated images and embed them into the document, could it be possible that this code could also serialise plugin resources & attachments in the same way?

Anatoli, has this gone anywhere?

If I may make a suggestion. It's not perfect, but is a middle ground between user-friendly, and technically difficult.

If you were to package the linked word document with a folder full of "local" images in an archive (much like the HTML export), it would be a simple single step for the user to Embed them into the document (Edit->Links..., Select All, Check "Save image in document", or whatever the checkbox reads). As an example, the directory structure would look something like this:

THE+PAGE+I+EXPORTED.doc
images/
   image1.jpg
   image2.jpg
   image3.jpg

Then all the links in THE+PAGE+I+EXPORTED.doc would have a link to the local images directory instead of out to Confluence, until you fixed them of course.

This really is a severely limiting bug considering we use Confluence to do all of the documentation for all of our systems, and when we need to release documents up the chain we need to do it in Word for formatting and annotation reasons.

Office Connector doesn't solve the original problem in extenso. E.g. when assembling page from another ones using macro

We have investigated the feasibility of fixing this bug by emding graphics into word documents. The fix is not trivial and will probably take from 2 to 4 weeks to complete. Given the popularity of this issue we will consider scheduling it soon.

Meanwhile the workaround is to use Office Connector. Instead of selecting Tools > Export to Word you select Tools > Edit in Word which open up the Confluence page in word including any images. You can then do whatever you like with the file on your local machine and save changes back to the server if needed. You can also use "Save As" option to save the file locally.

Anatoli.

If Confluence would like to be an Enterprise Wiki used for document management,
it should be a basic function to export content completely, like shown in the site which
is exported. The best solution should be to embed graphics in word documents.

Why confluence doesnt serialise the images into the file I still fail to understand ... it has all the info it should need to grab the file from both plugin resources and attachments through a simple parsing of the URL, yet for some reason it doesnt seem to be able to do this by itself but expects plugin authors to EACH implement their own way of persuading the images to be included in the word output ... this seems insane, surely implementing this in ONE place rather than MANY would be the sensible choice?

Sorry Andrew, I can't get your suggestion to work. I have an IE session cookie set for the Confluence instance I am logged into, but when I select 'Export to Word', I still don't get embedded images.

This bug really should be fixed or the option dropped from the Tools menu.

OK maybe I spoke too soon... Word might not support the embedded data: URI.

I was able to write up a way to get this working in a macro, using a data URI to embed the image. The approach could probably be used by Confluence for all images. See http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?messageID=257292336&#257292336 for more info.

Hi Philip,

Unfortunately it is only being investigated to see if a fix is feasible in the next release, an actual fix is not yet guaranteed at this point.

In the meantime the following workaround should work for affected customers (this will not actually embed the images directly in the document, but it should still allow the images to be retrieved successfully by users when viewing the document through Microsoft Word):

1. Login to Confluence using Internet Explorer and ensure that you tick "Remember my login on this computer"
2. So long as this cookie is maintained by Internet Explorer (i.e. until you wipe your cookies or click log out), you will be able to successfully view all images when viewing your document in Word. Note that this will be remain effective after you close IE although it will need to be performed after a restart of the server.

If you do not wish for all your users to have to perform this workaround, it would probably be best to perform the additional workaround suggested by Frank Worsley before distributing the exported word document.

Cheers,
Andrew Lynch

Hi Andrew
Thanks for your answer. In the meantime I will have a look at the Office Connector. But still looking forward for the next major release
Regards,
Philipp

Hi Philip,

We are currently investigating if a fix to this issue is feasible for the next major release. There are many votes to fix this bug and as such we consider it to be high priority, but it is unfortunately quite complicated to resolve properly and thus has taken some time to be scheduled.

Regards,
Andrew Lynch

I agree that this issue should be fixed within the next releases. Since most of all wiki pages contain images, a Word export just makes sense, if the attached images are part of it.

Is that feature really not so highly rated in your Roadmap? It exists since May 2006!

As a work around you could use the new Office Connector for Confluence. This is a free plugin that allows you to edit Confluence pages in Microsoft Word (Windows Only) or OpenOffice/NeoOffice.

Hence, instead of selecting Tools > Export to Word you could select Tools > Edit in Word which open up the Confluence page in word including any images. You can then do whatever you like with the file on your local machine.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Matt

We use our wiki for documentation - error-free function of the Word-Export - especially with images is for us substantially for the benefit of our Confluence wiki.
I dont understand why Atlassian don´t adress this bug.

Sorry for the misunderstanding guys. For some reason I thought Word was being used because users weren't comfortable with our editors. Obviously, this issue is not the case.

For images to be embedded in the document rather than pointing to the server, we would have to re-implement the way we currently do the word export. It is not a simple fix on our end (even though it sounds simple). As with any software, our development team must prioritise the large number of bugs/feature requests we have and schedule for a release. Even though it may sound 'ridiculous', highly voted issues is one of the factors which we take into account when we prioritise issues.

Agnes.

I agree completely with Nils. This is a serious, limiting bug, and it is ridiculous that we would have to "Vote" to have it fixed. This has apparently been a known, outstanding bug since May 2006. I don't understand why this isn't being addressed.

I voted on this problem many months ago. The last comment concerns me since it indicates a misunderstanding from Atlassian. The WordDav plugin does NOT help getting information out of the Wiki, it provides another way to get information into the wiki. Output from confluence is the problem. This has significantly constrained use of Confluence by many staff resulting in some review of alternatives.

Secondly, the CRTL-SHIFT-F9 does not work on my system. I have upgraded to Office 2007 (on XP) which may have an impact, though I thought I tried it last year on Word 2003.

p.s. My only full workaround has been a set of macros and complicated instructions so that administrative staff can take wiki word exports and create professional looking documentation.

To be honest, this bug hasn't been scheduled for a release yet. If it is, we will usually set the fix version/s. In the meantime, you may want to look at the WordDav plugin which lets you use word as a wysiwyg editor (I haven't used it myself, so I'm not quite sure how stable it is). Also, it seems to have a commercial license but has a 14 day trial period.

I absolutely agree with Dan's comments. The PDF format is too rigid as it prevents editing of exported content. It has its uses when one wants to fix content, or for "portability", but when documents require editing outside of the Wiki environment, the MS Word format is necessary.

This issue requires correction. It should yield immediate benefits to product users.