Merge ODG to PDF

Merge Several ODG Drawings into One 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. Drawing sets get split across files for the same reason a spreadsheet gets split across sheets — floor-1.odg, floor-2.odg and floor-3.odg are far easier to edit separately than one enormous document. They are considerably harder to send separately, and almost nobody on the receiving end has an application that opens them.

This route closes both gaps at once. Every .odg you queue is opened with LibreOffice Draw and exported through Draw's own PDF filter, and those PDFs are then joined into a single document in the order you uploaded them. Nothing is flattened into a picture along the way, so the merged file carries the same vector geometry and the same selectable text that each drawing would have produced on its own.

How to Merge ODG Files to PDF

1. Upload Your Drawings: Drag several .odg files onto the page or click "+ Add Files". The queue order becomes the page order in the finished PDF, so arrange the files before you start rather than reshuffling pages afterwards.
2. Leave "Combine?" on "Single PDF": This is the one control on the page that changes the outcome. "Single PDF" is the default and is what actually merges the queue into one document; switching it to "Individual PDFs" turns the job into an ordinary batch conversion that returns one PDF per drawing.
3. Skip the Page Setup Controls: Paper size, margin, orientation and the image placement settings belong to a different pipeline and have nothing to act on here — every page keeps the size and orientation stored inside its own drawing. The table below marks which control is which.
4. Merge and Download: Click "Merge" and take the finished PDF, which is named after the first drawing in the queue. 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.

How the Merge Actually Works

A drawing is a package, not an image: unzip one and you find content.xml, styles.xml, meta.xml, a manifest and a folder holding any embedded media. There is no picture inside to decode, so the job runs a real OpenDocument reader first and only then does anything resembling a merge.

Step 3 is a concatenation, not a re-layout. Pages are copied across with their own page boxes, fonts and content streams rather than being redrawn onto a common sheet, and four consequences follow from that. Mixed page sizes survive — an A3 site plan queued next to an A4 legend stays A3 next to A4. A multi-page drawing contributes all of its pages, so the page count is the sum of the drawings' pages, not the number of files. Text stays text, because nothing is re-rendered. And if a single file in the queue cannot be read, the job fails outright rather than quietly dropping that drawing and handing you a PDF that is short a page.

Which Settings on This Page Actually Do Anything

Expanding Advanced Options reveals a row of layout controls. Most of them come from the image-to-PDF pipeline — the one that decodes photographs and positions them on a blank page — and there is no photograph being positioned here, so they are inert on an OpenDocument source. This is the honest summary rather than a tuning guide.

If a page comes out the wrong size or the wrong way round, the fix is the page setup inside the drawing. There is no setting on this page that overrides it.

Getting the Pages Right in LibreOffice Draw First

Because the export takes its geometry from the file, the page setup is worth doing once in Draw before you upload. Draw's Page ▸ Page Properties dialog defines the paper format, orientation and margins for the drawing, and whatever you set there is what arrives in the merged PDF.

One trap is worth knowing about while you are in there. If a PDF you exported from Draw yourself came out a page short, the cause is usually the Range setting rather than the drawing. On the General tab of Draw's PDF export dialog, Selection exports only what is currently selected, while All exports every defined print range — and the whole document only when no print range is defined. A stray selection or a print range left over from an earlier session is enough to quietly truncate the output. That trap does not exist on this route, where a multi-page .odg is exported whole, but it explains a lot of mysteriously incomplete drawing sets.

A Folder of Drawings vs One Merged PDF

ODG is defined by the OASIS OpenDocument Format specification, most recently approved as an OASIS Standard at version 1.3 on 27 April 2021, with version 1.4 published since. It is an excellent format to author a diagram in and a poor one to hand over, which is the whole case for merging.

Keep the .odg originals. The merged PDF is the deliverable, not the master copy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What order do the pages come out in?

Upload order, top to bottom. We checked this against our own merge implementation rather than assuming it: each queued file is exported to PDF individually, the exports are collected in the order the files arrived, and PDFBox appends them in exactly that sequence. Rearranging the queue before you start is therefore the only page-ordering step you need — there is no separate sort applied afterwards, alphabetical or otherwise.

My drawings are different sizes — will the merge force them onto one paper size?

No, and that is deliberate. Merging copies each page across with its own page box, so an A3 floor plan queued alongside A4 detail sheets produces a PDF containing both sizes. Every mainstream PDF reader handles mixed page sizes without complaint, and print dialogs offer a scale-to-paper option when you need everything on one tray. If you genuinely need a uniform size, set it in each drawing's page properties in Draw before uploading.

Does a multi-page drawing contribute all of its pages?

Yes. Draw's PDF export is a paged export, so a three-page drawing becomes three PDF pages in the drawing's own order, and those three pages then take their place in the merge. The practical consequence is that the finished page count is the sum of the drawings' pages rather than the number of files you uploaded — four files can easily produce a twelve-page PDF.

Is the text in the merged PDF still selectable and searchable?

Yes. Text is exported as text by Draw's PDF filter and then copied into the merged document without being re-rendered, so labels, callouts and title blocks stay selectable, copyable and searchable. The one caveat is fonts: a typeface that is not installed on the machine performing the export is metric-substituted, which can nudge line breaks in a tightly set label. Sticking to widely available typefaces in the drawing avoids it.

Do the paper size, margin and orientation controls apply to my drawings?

No. Those controls belong to the image-to-PDF pipeline and are inert on an OpenDocument source, because the page geometry comes out of the drawing itself. Choosing A4 will not shrink a Letter-sized page and choosing Landscape will not rotate a portrait one. Change the page setup in Draw and merge again. The same is true of the image placement, alignment, quality and transparency settings on this page.

What happens if one file in the queue cannot be read?

The whole job stops and reports a failure rather than skipping the file. That is the safer behaviour for a drawing set — a merge that silently omitted page 7 would be worse than one that refused to run — but it does mean a single bad file blocks the batch. The usual culprits are a password-protected drawing, which is encrypted rather than merely proprietary and needs an unprotected copy saved out of Draw first, and a file of some other type renamed to .odg, which no OpenDocument reader will open.

Is "Individual PDFs" still a merge?

No, and the distinction matters. Setting "Combine?" to "Individual PDFs" reroutes the job away from the merge path entirely: each drawing is converted on its own and you get one PDF per file, with nothing joined. Use it when the drawings are unrelated and headed to different recipients. Leave it on "Single PDF" whenever the drawings are pages of one set. For a single drawing with no merging involved, ODG to PDF is the direct route.

Can I combine ODG drawings with PDFs or photos I already have?

Not in one pass — this page accepts .odg input only. Run the merge here first, then join the result to your existing documents with Merge PDF, which preserves each source document's own page size rather than forcing everything onto a common sheet. If what you want to add is photographs or scans rather than PDFs, Merge Image to PDF builds a PDF from image files, and that PDF can then be joined to this one the same way.

Why is the merged PDF larger than I expected?

Vector artwork is compact, so the size almost always comes from raster content placed inside the drawings. Photographs, screenshots and scanned logos are carried into the PDF at the resolution they were stored at, and nothing on this route downsamples them — a set of drawings each carrying a full-resolution site photo produces a correspondingly large document. Run the finished file through our PDF compressor rather than degrading the source drawings; that shrinks the embedded photographs while leaving the vector lines and text untouched.

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 the merged PDF and the per-drawing intermediates created along the way. 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 OpenDocument Drawings.