Confluence Rich Viewer is wacky

Thanks for the response. Yes I see that I can disable the rich viewer if I'm willing to give up auto-updates. I just submitted a request according to your suggestion that these two be allowed to be chosen independently.

Are there any updates to the Confluence integration planned? The Autosize feature produces erratic results and defining fixed heights and widths for an embedded graphic is a clear no go if one doesn't know anything about the screen real estate of users (and one shouldn't have to make quirky assumptions).

Hi Andreas thanks for continuing this thread! Some white margins can be normal when inserting diagrams in Confluence. Please take a look at this community post to review your options for white space in embedded documents.

If this does not address your question add your feedback to the product feedback section of the community, as explained above in Maison’s response.

Thanks for the speedy reply Abigail. I was aware of the two pages and have already tried a variety of page setting combinations. Unfortunately to no avail. While my wishlist for new Lucid functionality is not empty with regards to Confluence integration I merely desire predictable and stable behaviour. Which is why I'm interested to learn about your roadmap in this area.

Hi Andreas!

I've heard back from our development team on this and while we do not have the functionality you've described currently on the roadmap we'd be very interested in understanding exactly what you mean by 'erratic results.' Would you mind submitting a support ticket detailing this behavior so we can assist you further?

Thank you!

Erratic results... I'm surprised you've gotten anything that could be described any other way. I've tested a bunch of different things to try to narrow down exactly what's happening. Note that I did raise a bug report earlier but found this community thread and the results below afterwards and there doesn't seem to be any way for me to access my former bug report but perhaps this information will be useful to others in at least understanding what's going on and a possible but annoying workaround.

The first problem seems to be related to how the plugin sets the dimensions of the lucidchart-simpleviewer-inner-viewer DIV. The width of this seems to be fixed based on the size of the usable space when the page loaded and the height seems to be scaled to match the aspect ratio of the generated image even if this is ludicrous. For example I created a simple diagram with a single bog-standard Process box from the flow chart shape set and nothing else. I embedded this on the page as a LucidChart diagram using the simple viewer auto (original) size left aligned. The page was loaded in Google Chrome. The intrinsic size of the rendered image is 480 x 400 pixels. There's more margin around it than I'd like but it's not terrible. The rendered size on the page is 327 x 273 pixels which is also a reasonable size for the space and content. The lucidchart-simpleviewer-inner-viewer DIV however is 1518 pixels wide and 1167.69px high giving this small process box sitting up in the top left corner of a viewport that extends the width of the screen and scrolls off the bottom of the screen. Surely the height shouldn't need to be any more than the height of the image! This is when the window is maximized. When I break it out into a smaller non-maximal window and reload the page the intrinsic and rendered image dimensions don't change but the dimensions of that DIV change to 662 x 509.231 pixels which roughly matches the width of the available space in the new window but is still far larger than makes sense. I'd also note that when you resize the window it does resize that DIV to a reasonable size for the generated image so it seems that somewhat sane sizing of the diagram viewport is possible and works on page resize but not on page load. This does give rise to a workaround although it's somewhat annoying. Any kind of resize event after page load will probably make your simpleviewer LucidChart objects sanely sized. For example restore and then maximize the browser window. It works but it's not exactly the kind of thing you want to tell your users to do to make their documents look sane.

Additionally I think this is probably only 1 of 3 issues related to that particular bug report. There is still the issue of uneven and unwanted whitespace and clipping around a diagram and no stray objects that seem to explain it.

Finally there's the issue of "auto" sizing. It doesn't seem to auto-size anything. What I would intuitively expect of an auto-size function is to automatically size the diagram based on the available space but what it seems to do is just do some static calculation based on the possible size of the diagram. That said the whitespace and clipping issues I've experienced on a number of diagrams suggest that it may not be doing this reliably in the first place so... In any case this seems like it would have been an obvious must-have feature but apparently not. 

On the issue of whitespace that single Process box that renders as a 480x400 pixel image there is 80 pixels of whitespace at top bottom left and right. This is 33% of the width and 40% of the height is whitespace. That seems excessive and there seems to be no way to control it. I thought maybe reducing page margins might affect this but no. On other more complex and much larger diagrams like the one referenced in my bug report I get 408 pixels of whitespace on the left 80 pixels of whitespace on top bottom and right and the viewport clips both the right and bottom of the diagram. This is on a rendered image with an intrinsic size of 4232 x 2716 pixels. This seems to suggest that it's trying to generate a flat 80 pixel border on everything regardless of size but not clear reason why the extra border on some diagrams.

I hope that gives some insight into the "erratic" behaviour of embedding LucidChart diagrams into Confluence pages using the LucidChart plugin for Confluence. Some of this seems like definite bugs. Some may be argued to be feature requests but isn't the basic function of embedded a diagram on a page like you would on any other system the obvious use case you'd want to cover first? It seems like Lucid has put most of their eggs into the Rich Viewer basket and while it might seem cool from a technology standpoint it adds lots of behaviours that someone wanting to add diagrams to their documents just will not want.

I've been using Lucidchart for 5 years already and the situation didn't change all this time. 
I love this tool but the Lucidchart Confluence connector is unusable neither "Rich" nor old. Problems with zoom and auto-sizing make it just a horrible experience to insert configure and then use Lucidchart diagram.

If the connector would just inserted the diagrams as standard "Images" with proper auto-sizing that would be much better than the current behavior. This is what other diagraming tools are doing and I have to slowly but surely shift more and more to other tools just because their Confluence connectors are much more intuitive.

Hello Oleg

Thanks for adding to this thread and sharing your experience and feedback. Although it does seem that you are dissatisfied with the Lucidchart Confluence integration - and I'm sorry about this! - we appreciate that you took the time to provide detailed feedback around what's causing trouble as it helps us identify where we can do better.

There may indeed be a few steps to take to adjust some settings for some diagrams to display as expected. 

When a diagram is set to auto-size by default within Confluence the frame adjusts to fit the size of the diagram which sometimes depending on the shape of your diagrams may cause your diagram to look off-centered or to have unexpected margins.

However if you customize the Confluence frame dimensions the diagram adjusts to fit the size of the frame which most of the time resolves this type of issues. The following community post explains how to make adjustments so that your diagrams display as you wish: 

With that being said we hear you and appreciate your suggestion. While I am not able to provide any certainty as to when and how the current experience would be improved I will pass on this feedback internally to the concerned teams and would definitely recommend you to post it as well in our Product Feedback section of the community.

I apologise for the frustration this is causing and thank you again for the feedback!