ODG to SVG Converter

Convert OpenDocument Drawing (.odg) to SVG

Both ends of this conversion are vector formats, and this converter treats them that way. Your .odg is opened as a LibreOffice Draw document and written out through Draw's own SVG export filter (draw_svg_Export), so the shapes in the SVG are the shapes you drew: the same coordinates, the same curves, the same fills and strokes. Nothing is rendered to pixels at any point, and nothing is traced.

That distinction is the whole point of this page. Most routes into SVG are traces — a raster image goes in, an algorithm guesses outlines from colour boundaries, and a few thousand approximate paths come out. A Draw document never needs that, because the geometry is already sitting in the file waiting to be copied. Our pipeline names Draw's SVG filter explicitly rather than relying on LibreOffice's implicit pick, so an .odg always takes the vector route. The result is strictly better than anything a tracer could produce from the same drawing.

How to Convert ODG to SVG

1. Upload Your Drawing: Drag the .odg onto the page or click "+ Add Files". OpenDocument Drawings are small — the whole document is zipped XML plus whatever media you placed in it — so uploads are quick even on a slow connection.
2. Give the Converter One Page Per File: An SVG is a single canvas with no concept of pages, so a drawing whose content sits on one page maps onto it cleanly. If your document has several pages, split it in Draw first, or send it to PDF instead, which is a paged format.
3. Convert the Queue: Click "Convert". Each drawing is exported on its own, and there is nothing to configure — the geometry is copied rather than reconstructed, so no quality, resolution or precision setting has anything to act on.
4. Download and Use It Anywhere: You get a plain image/svg+xml file that scales to any size without softening. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

What Actually Happens to Your File

An OpenDocument Drawing is a package rather than an image: unzip one and you find content.xml, styles.xml, a manifest and a folder of embedded media. There is no picture inside to decode — the drawing exists only as a description of objects — so the conversion runs a real OpenDocument reader and then asks it to write the same objects out in SVG's vocabulary.

Advanced Options on this page still carries a precision control inherited from the raster-tracing route that image sources take to SVG. A Draw document never reaches that tracer, so the control has nothing to act on. There is genuinely no setting to tune here, and that is the good outcome rather than a missing feature.

ODG and SVG Side by Side

What Carries Across, and What to Watch

• Shapes, connectors and curves come across as geometry. A Bezier curve is exported as path data with the control points you set, not as a chain of short segments sampled off a rendered image, so the file stays small and the curve stays smooth at any zoom.
• Structure survives. Grouped objects arrive as nested groups rather than as a flat pile of anonymous paths — not with Draw's exact internal layer semantics, but structured enough that the SVG is worth opening in an editor afterwards instead of merely worth looking at.
• Fonts are the one genuine caveat. SVG references typefaces by name rather than embedding them, so a machine without the font substitutes something else and a tightly set label can re-wrap. If the type has to look identical everywhere, PDF is the safer target.
• Photographs stay raster. A photo you placed in the drawing was always pixels and cannot become vector; it is embedded inside the SVG as image data. A drawing that is mostly photography therefore produces a large SVG, and a raster target such as ODG to PNG fits it better.
• Three-dimensional objects flatten. SVG has no 3D model whatsoever, so anything Draw builds with its 3D engine — extrusions, rotated solids — can only arrive as flat two-dimensional shapes.

When PDF Is the Better Target

SVG is the right output when the drawing is going onto a web page, into a design tool, or into a build pipeline that wants text-based assets it can diff and restyle with CSS. ODG to PDF is the better output when the drawing has several pages, when it is going to a printer, when it has to be filed or archived, or when the typography must render identically on a machine you do not control. Both routes run through the same LibreOffice Draw import and both keep the geometry as vectors — they differ in what the destination format is able to hold, not in how faithfully the source is read.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a trace of my drawing, or the actual shapes?

The actual shapes. Tracing is what you do when all you have left is pixels — a scan, a screenshot, a flattened logo — and it works by guessing where the edges were. Your .odg still contains the real objects, so the export copies them into SVG's own elements instead of reconstructing them. Nothing in this route rasterises the drawing, which means there is no stage at which precision could be lost and then approximately recovered.

Is there a quality or precision setting I should change?

No, and that is worth stating plainly because the page still shows one. The precision control under Advanced Options belongs to the tracing route that raster sources take to SVG, and a Draw document does not pass through it. Because the output is a copy of the geometry rather than a reconstruction of it, there is no accuracy dial to trade against file size — you already have the most accurate result the source can produce.

Will the SVG open in a browser without any plugin?

Yes. SVG has been a W3C Recommendation since long before the current browser generation — the 1.1 Second Edition Recommendation dates from 16 August 2011 — and every current desktop and mobile browser renders it natively. You can point an <img> tag at the file, drop it into an <object>, or paste the markup inline in your HTML and style parts of it with CSS.

Do the fonts in my drawing come across?

The type is exported as vector content, so it is never a blurry raster of the letters. What SVG does not do is embed the typeface: it names the font and expects the viewer to have it. A machine that does not substitutes a metric-compatible face, which can change line breaks in a tight text box. If that matters, convert the drawing to PDF instead, or convert the text to curves in Draw before exporting so the letterforms are locked in as shapes.

My drawing has more than one page — what should I do?

Decide whether you actually want SVG. An SVG has a single root canvas and no page model, so a paged document does not map onto one file the way it maps onto a PDF. If you need every page, ODG to PDF is the direct answer. If you specifically need SVG, split the drawing in Draw so each file holds one page and convert them one at a time — that also gives you predictable, individually addressable assets, which is usually what an SVG is wanted for anyway.

Can I keep editing the SVG in Inkscape or Illustrator?

Yes, and this is where a native export earns its keep. Because the objects come across as objects, you open the file and find shapes you can select, recolour and move. Traced output is the opposite experience: thousands of unnamed paths in stacking order, no groups, and colours quantised to whatever palette the tracer settled on. The same drawing exported natively stays workable.

What happens to photographs I placed inside the drawing?

They stay raster, because they always were. A photograph has no underlying geometry to preserve, so it is embedded in the SVG as image data and rides along with the vector content. The practical consequence is size: a diagram of boxes and arrows usually produces an SVG comparable to or smaller than the .odg, while a drawing built around large photographs produces a much bigger one. In that case convert to a raster format and let the format do what it is good at.

Is anything lost going from ODG to SVG?

The geometry is not resampled, so the drawing itself arrives intact. What can change is anything SVG has no equivalent for: the page model, Draw's 3D rendering, and a handful of application-specific effects that have to be approximated with the primitives SVG offers. Fonts are the other one, since SVG references them by name rather than carrying them. None of that is the compounding, guess-the-edges kind of loss you get from a trace — it is the ordinary cost of moving between two formats with different feature sets.

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 available for this source.