ODG to PDF Converter

Convert OpenDocument Drawing (.odg) to PDF

An .odg is what LibreOffice Draw and Apache OpenOffice Draw save to: a zip archive of OpenDocument XML describing shapes, connectors, text frames and pages. It is a good format to author in and a poor one to send to anybody, because almost nobody who receives one has an application that opens it. PDF is the standard answer, and for a drawing it is an unusually good answer — a PDF can carry the same vector geometry the .odg carries, so nothing has to be flattened to make it portable.

This converter opens your file with LibreOffice Draw and exports it through Draw's own PDF filter (draw_pdf_Export), the same filter the desktop application uses. Nothing is rendered to a pixel grid along the way: curves stay curves, text stays text, and the result prints at the printer's own resolution rather than at a resolution somebody had to choose in advance.

How to Convert ODG to PDF

1. Upload Your Drawing: Drag the .odg onto the page or click "+ Add Files". OpenDocument Drawings are usually small — the artwork sits compressed inside the zip container — so the upload is rarely the slow part of the job.
2. Choose How a Batch Is Bundled: "Combine?" is the one control on this page that genuinely changes the outcome. "Single PDF" merges everything you queued into one document in upload order; "Individual PDFs" returns a separate PDF for each drawing.
3. Leave the Page Setup to the Drawing: The export reproduces the page size and orientation stored inside the .odg, so there is nothing to pick between A4 and Letter — whatever the drawing was built on is what you get back.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and take the PDF. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark, and no office suite needed at the other end.

What Actually Happens to Your File

An OpenDocument Drawing is a package, not an image: unzip one and you find content.xml, styles.xml, meta.xml, a manifest and a folder of any embedded media. There is no picture inside it to decode — the drawing exists only as a description of objects — which is why the conversion runs a real OpenDocument reader rather than an image decoder.

Which Settings on This Page Actually Do Anything

If you expand Advanced Options you may see a row of layout controls. Most of them belong to the image-to-PDF pipeline — the one that takes decoded photographs and places them on a page — and they have nothing to act on when the source is a Draw document, because Draw's own export decides the page. The table below is the honest summary.

If a PDF comes out the wrong size, the fix is the page setup inside the drawing, not a setting here.

ODG and PDF at a Glance

What This Route Does Not Do

Draw's export dialog on the desktop exposes a set of document-level switches that this route does not: PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2b and PDF/A-3b archival conformance, tagged PDF for accessibility, hybrid PDF and image downsampling, plus the user and permissions passwords that live on the same dialog's Security tab. We run the filter with its defaults, which is what you want for an ordinary hand-off and is not what you want for a formal archive submission — if a regulator or a library has asked for PDF/A specifically, export it from Draw yourself.

Two other cases fall outside this route. A drawing saved with password protection is encrypted rather than merely proprietary, so no importer can read the layout without the password; open it in Draw, save an unprotected copy, and convert that. And a file that has simply been renamed to .odg is not one — a genuine OpenDocument package begins with the zip signature PK and stores its mimetype entry first, and a renamed file will not open.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the PDF hold vectors, or just a picture of the drawing?

Vectors. The conversion runs Draw's PDF export filter against the drawing's own objects, so a circle is stored as a circle rather than as a grid of pixels shaped like one. Zoom to 800% and the edges stay clean, and a printer renders it at the printer's resolution instead of at whatever raster resolution a conversion step had picked. That is the practical difference between converting the source file and converting a rendered image of it.

Does a multi-page drawing become a multi-page PDF?

Yes, one PDF page per Draw page, in the drawing's own order. Draw's PDF export is a paged export — that is what the filter is for — so a three-page site plan arrives as a three-page PDF rather than as three files or as one page with everything stacked on it. This is one of the main reasons to pick PDF over SVG, which has no page model at all.

Is the text in the PDF selectable and searchable?

Yes. Text is exported as text rather than flattened into a raster, so you can select it, copy it and search it in any reader. The one caveat is fonts: a typeface that is not installed on the machine performing the export is metric-substituted, which can shift line breaks in a tightly set label. Sticking to widely available typefaces in the drawing is the reliable way to avoid it.

What does the "Combine?" setting actually change?

It decides the shape of the job, not the quality of the output. On "Single PDF" the queued drawings are exported and then merged into one document in the order you uploaded them, which is what you want for a set of related pages. On "Individual PDFs" each drawing is exported on its own and you get one PDF per file, which is what you want when the drawings are unrelated and will be sent to different people.

Do the paper size, margin and orientation settings apply to my drawing?

No. Those controls come from the image-to-PDF pipeline and are inert on an OpenDocument source — the exported PDF uses the page size and orientation recorded inside the drawing. Selecting A4 here will not turn a Letter-sized drawing into an A4 one, and choosing Landscape will not rotate a portrait page. Change the page setup in Draw and convert again.

Can I get PDF/A, a tagged PDF or a password from this page?

Not from here. Those are options in LibreOffice's own PDF export dialog, and this route deliberately runs the filter with its defaults for compatibility. If you need archival conformance, accessibility tagging or encryption, export the PDF from Draw with those boxes ticked. For everything else — sending a diagram, printing it, attaching it to a ticket — the default export is the right output.

What happens to photographs placed inside the drawing?

They are carried into the PDF as embedded raster images at the resolution they were stored at. Nothing is downsampled on this route, so a drawing with several full-resolution photographs in it produces a correspondingly large PDF. If the result is too big to email, run it through our PDF compressor rather than degrading the source drawing — that keeps the vector content sharp while shrinking the embedded photos.

How is this different from printing the drawing to PDF?

A print-to-PDF driver sees whatever the application sends to the printing subsystem, and complex pages are frequently flattened or partly rasterised on the way through. Exporting through Draw's PDF filter skips the printing path entirely and writes the document model directly, which is why the text stays text and the page size comes from the drawing rather than from the selected printer's paper tray.

Can I turn several drawings into one PDF?

Yes, two ways. Leave "Combine?" on "Single PDF" and upload them together, or use the dedicated merge ODG to PDF route, which does the same job with combining as the explicit intent. If you already have finished PDFs from different sources, our PDF merger joins those instead, which preserves each document's own page size rather than forcing them onto a common one.

How are my uploaded files handled?

Every upload travels over an encrypted connection, is processed on our servers, and is deleted automatically after a few hours along with anything it produced. Nothing is shared, published or reused, no account is required, and no watermark is applied. The ODG converter hub lists the other targets for this source, and Publisher to PDF takes the same Draw-based route for .pub files.