{"id":2317,"date":"2014-10-08T13:54:52","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T11:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.viaboxx.de\/2014\/10\/08\/confluence2md\/"},"modified":"2021-08-10T22:21:04","modified_gmt":"2021-08-10T22:21:04","slug":"confluence2md","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.viaboxx.de\/en\/blog\/confluence2md\/","title":{"rendered":"Generate nice documents out of Confluence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Problem:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your company is using Confluence<\/a> and this is the place, where the employees write their documents, maintain the links between the pages etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have to deliver high-quality documents (documentation, manuals etc.) to your customer, so you have to produce PDF or Word-files. The customer wants you to use specific templates with header-page, logo, table of contents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can you bring the content of the Confluence pages into the documents for shipping?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You could write the documentation with word, you can copy-paste the confluence pages into word files, you can use the export functions of confluence to export pages as PDF or Word files, but: all those options are either manual effort, hard to maintain or do not produce documents in the format that you can control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What you want is a customizable solution, that even can be 100% automated to have docments with up-to-date content ready to deliver at any time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Idea:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the idea is to use the Confluence2MD tool to retrieve the pages out of confluence and convert them into a Markdown<\/a> file. A markdown file is  a text file and the PanDoc<\/a> tool, can convert such files into various formats, e.g. Word or PDF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can use master-\/child documents to bring the generated documents into a document that contains a table-of-content etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Use Confluence2MD from maven-central<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Confluence2MD is a tool written by Viaboxx, published as open source (Apache 2.0 license). The artifacts can be retrieved from maven-central<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[codesyntax lang=\"xml\" lines=\"no\"]\n<pre>&lt;dependency&gt;\n  &lt;groupId&gt;de.viaboxx.markdown&lt;\/groupId&gt;\n  &lt;artifactId&gt;confluence2md&lt;\/artifactId&gt;\n  &lt;version&gt;1.5.2&lt;\/version&gt;\n  &lt;classifier&gt;fat&lt;\/classifier&gt;\n&lt;\/dependency&gt;<\/pre>\n[\/codesyntax]<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
confluence2md supports to retrieve your confluence pages with the REST\/HTTP API and converts a document hierarchy into a markdown file. It supports links to other chapters or external URLs, tables, lists, codeblocks and images. It even renders diagrams described with the PlantUML<\/a> syntax as images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To run the tool, you need a JRE<\/a> (java version 7 or newer).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Install Pandoc<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
To convert the Markdown file to any document format, you need to install Pandoc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
see http:\/\/johnmacfarlane.net\/pandoc\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Usage<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
See the usage of confluence2md about the possible options:<\/p>\n\n\n\n