Headings CSS

This short tutorial shows you how to change the heading styles using CSS...

By default, Confluence puts a grey background behind most heading styles (h2. to h6.) - this rarely fits with your organisations design guidelines so it's time to take some action...

All Heading Levels

The most common first step when customising headings is to choose a font that more closely matches that of your design guidelines and remove the background and bottom border from the headings.

Here's an example of CSS that will do just that:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
font-family: trebuchet ms, arial, verdana, lucida grande, sans-serif;
line-height: normal;
font-weight: bold;
background-color: transparent;
border-bottom: none;
}

This CSS modifies all heading styles to ensure that:

They use a specific font-family

When specifying the font, always remember that the person viewing the page might not have that font installed. As such, you should specify alternative fonts (in order of priority) to try and at the end of your list have either sans-serif or serif.

Their line-height is normal (so our Text Styles CSS doesn't make them look odd)
Their font-weight is set to bold so they stand out from any other text of a similar size
Their background-color is transparent (ie. remove that grey background)
Thier border-bottom is removed (to remove the blue or grey line that appears under some heading styles)

Specific Heading Levels

After deiining the common features for all headings, the next thing to do is define each individual heading (if required).

Because each heading is actually wrapped in an anchor (so that you can link to it), you need two separate styles - one for the heading itself and another to correct any oddities that may appear when the mouse is over the heading.

Example:

h1 {
font-size: 22px;
color: #003366;
padding: 0px;
padding-bottom: 4px;
padding-top: 12px;
margin: 12px 0px 4px 0px;
}

h1 a:hover {
border-bottom: none;
}

The first style sets the overall design for heading level 1 (h1) wheras the second (h1 a:hover) corrects any visual glitches that you may see when the mouse is held over the heading.

The most useful settings for each heading level are: Padding, Margin, Text Formatting and Font.

Common heading font-sizes are:

Heading Level	Size
h1	22px
h2	16px
h3	14px
h4	14px
h5	12px
h6	16px

You've no doubt got a couple of questions about the table above:

Q	Why are h3 and h4 the same size?
A	They are usually different colours or one may be bold whilst the other isn't. For example, while `h3` is likely to be different to the body text colour, `h4` is normally the same as the body text colour. You can see an example in our Headings tutorial.

Q	Why is h6 so big?
A	We normally style `h6` to look exactly the same as `h2` so that we can use `h6` to add "Preface" or Introduction" headings, etc., on pages that use the toc macro. This way, it's a lot easier to stop the table of contents showing the headings that preceed it by simply using `h6` for those hadings.