ODG to TIFF Converter

ODG to TIFF: A Draw Document as a Print-Grade Raster

A .odg is an OpenDocument Graphics drawing — LibreOffice Draw's editable shapes, connectors and text frames, stored as XML inside a ZIP package. TIFF is what print shops, journals and imaging archives ask for instead: the container described by TIFF Revision 6.0, finalised 3 June 1992 by Aldus Corporation, whose TIFF stewardship passed to Adobe after the 1994 merger. Converting between them means rasterizing, and the compression scheme the file is written with matters more here than anything else on the page — because the default is not the one a diagram wants.

How to Convert ODG to TIFF

1. Upload Your ODG File: Drag the .odg onto the page or click "+ Add Files". LibreOffice Draw and Apache OpenOffice Draw documents are both accepted, and several can be queued at once.
2. Change the Compression Type: This is the control that decides whether the result is print-safe. Compression Type opens on JPEG, which is lossy and smears the hard edges a diagram is built from. Switch it to LZW — lossless and the most widely readable option — or DEFLATE; pick NONE only when you want an uncompressed archival master.
3. Set the Image Resolution and File Extension: Image resolution starts on "Keep original" and also accepts a percentage, a height preset, or an explicit Width x Height. Under File extension, TIFF and TIF are both offered so you can match whatever spelling the receiving software expects.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and take the result — one TIFF per drawing page, individually or as a ZIP. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

Which TIFF Compression to Choose

How the Drawing Becomes a Raster

Nothing here treats the .odg as a picture. LibreOffice opens it as a Draw document, exports it through Draw's own PDF filter, and the page is rendered from there — which is what keeps the drawing's page size, object positions and text placement faithful.

Worth knowing before you upload: because the pipeline writes one file per drawing page, a multi-page Draw document comes back as a numbered set in page order, bundled into a ZIP, rather than as a single TIFF. That is the usual shape for a prepress hand-off — most print workflows want one file per page anyway — but it does mean a 40-page drawing produces 40 files, and at 300 DPI with a lossless scheme those add up quickly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the default TIFF compression a lossy one?

TIFF is a container that supports many compression schemes, several of them lossy, and JPEG-in-TIFF is one of them — the dropdown simply opens on it. For photographs that is defensible. For a Draw file, which is nearly always line art and text, it is the wrong pick: JPEG's block transform introduces ringing along exactly the hard edges a diagram is made of. Switch to LZW. Note that the list shows both "LOSSY" and "JPEG"; they select the same JPEG-in-TIFF scheme.

My print shop rejected the TIFF. What went wrong?

Most often the JPEG compression inside it. Baseline TIFF 6.0 readers are only required to handle uncompressed, PackBits and CCITT data, so a JPEG-compressed TIFF is an extension file that some RIPs and older prepress tools refuse outright. Re-export with LZW or NONE and it is usually accepted. The second common cause is colour space: some shops need CMYK rather than RGB, which is a conversion for a print-aware application rather than for this pipeline.

Is .tif different from .tiff?

Not as a format — same specification, same bytes. The three-letter spelling survives from eight-character filenames. Only the receiving software's matching rules differ, which is why the File extension group offers both. If a tool rejects a file, renaming between the two spellings is a legitimate first thing to try, and the twin page ODG to TIF documents the same conversion under the shorter name.

Can one TIFF hold every page of a multi-page Draw document?

The format can — TIFF supports several Image File Directories in one file, which is how multi-page scans are stored — but this route writes one TIFF per drawing page, numbered in page order and bundled into a ZIP. If you need the pages in a single file, either assemble them with a tool that writes multi-page TIFFs, or use ODG to PDF, which keeps every page in one document by default.

What resolution will the TIFF be?

The page is rendered at 300 DPI, which is the standard print figure, so an A4 drawing arrives at roughly 2480 x 3508 pixels and a US Letter page at about 2550 x 3300. For most print work that is exactly right. If you need something else, set it under Image resolution — and remember that scaling down from the full render is always cleaner than enlarging a smaller one.

Will transparency survive into the TIFF?

Only with a lossless compression type. TIFF can carry an alpha channel, but JPEG-in-TIFF — the default — cannot, so transparency does not survive there. Choose LZW or DEFLATE if the drawing has transparent regions you care about. When the destination cannot handle alpha at all, it is cleaner to give the drawing an explicit background rectangle in Draw so the colour is your decision rather than a downstream tool's.

Does the drawing stay scalable after this?

No — a TIFF is a fixed grid of samples, so once the page is rendered the shapes, connectors and text are pixels and cannot be re-flowed, re-coloured per object, or enlarged without softening. Keep the .odg as the master. If what you actually need is a scalable hand-off rather than a raster, ODG to SVG keeps the drawing's real vector geometry.

How are my files handled?

Your upload travels over an encrypted connection, is processed on our servers, and is deleted automatically a few hours later along with anything it produced. Nothing is shared, published or reused, no account is needed, and no watermark is applied. The ODG converter hub indexes every other target this source can be pointed at.