What is an ODG file?

ODG is a container: a wrapper that holds streams encoded by something else. It stores shapes and coordinates rather than pixels, so it stays sharp at any size — a logo scaled to a billboard loses nothing. It is used for editing and line art and logos.

The extension is .odg, and the full name is OpenDocument Graphics. Both matter less than what the file can hold, which is what the rest of this page is about.

OASIS published it in 2005. The specification is ISO/IEC 26300.

Age is worth knowing here for one practical reason: the older a format is, the more programs have had time to learn it.

It is published in full, so anyone can implement it from the document rather than by inspection, which is why it turns up in so many programs and why files written twenty years ago still open. A published specification is not the same thing as a royalty-free one: where a format wraps a codec, the patent licensing is a separate question the standard does not settle.

ODG is not limited to one page, which matters when converting to something that is: one conversion produces one file holding a single page — the first one, unless the page is something the converter lets you pick.

ODG holds a drawing: shapes placed on a canvas rather than text in a flow.

That is what decides how it converts: the text reflows, so page numbers are a property of the output rather than of the file.

ODG stores the parts of an image separately rather than flattened together, which is what makes it a working file. Almost every format it converts into flattens them, and the flattening is not reversible — keep the layered original.

LibreOffice Draw reads it, and so do most programs of the same kind.

If a file will not open, the format is rarely the problem — it is more often that the program predates it. Converting to something older is the reliable way past that, and it is what the rest of this site is for.

No browser reads it.

That is the single most common reason to convert it: not that the format is bad, but that the place you want to show the file cannot read it.

ODG is meant to be opened and changed. Keep the file in this format for as long as the work is going on, and export from it whenever a finished copy is needed.

ODG is what LibreOffice Draw saves: a page-based vector drawing with shapes, connectors, text boxes, images and layers. Like the rest of the OpenDocument family it is a ZIP of XML, so the drawing is readable text and can be produced or inspected by a program without reverse-engineering anything.

Draw sits somewhere between a diagram tool and a page-layout program, which is why it is hard to describe and why most people meet it by accident — usually by opening something in LibreOffice and finding themselves in an application they did not know existed.

Diagrams with connectors that stay attached. Draw a flowchart, join two boxes, move one, and the line follows — which sounds unremarkable until you have tried to maintain a flowchart in a word processor. Organisation charts, network diagrams, process maps and floor plans are its natural territory.

It also handles page-based layout in a way the word processor does not: posters, certificates, labels, seating plans, anything where objects need to sit at exact coordinates rather than flow. Multiple pages, layers, snapping and alignment guides are all there, and none of it costs anything.

Draw opens PDF files and makes them editable — text becomes text boxes, graphics become objects, and the result can be changed and exported back to PDF. It is the most useful thing the application does and almost nobody knows about it.

The limits are real. The reconstruction is approximate on anything designed, text is split into boxes at odd places, and complex layouts arrive as a mass of fragments. For fixing a typo, redacting a line, changing a date or updating a price on a document whose source is long gone, it is genuinely the fastest free route available.

This is the format’s practical weakness. LibreOffice and OpenOffice read it; essentially nothing else does. Not Illustrator, not Inkscape properly, not Microsoft Office, not a browser, not a phone.

So an ODG is a working file rather than something to send. Anybody who receives one and does not run LibreOffice is stuck, and the answer is always to export rather than to explain. Keeping the ODG as the editable master and exporting a delivery copy is the whole workflow.

PDF for anything final: it keeps the vectors so it prints sharply at any size, it opens on everything, and it looks the same for everyone. This is the right export for a diagram going into a document or a poster going to a printer.

SVG when the drawing is going onto a web page or into another vector program — Inkscape, Figma and Illustrator all read SVG, so it is the practical route out of the LibreOffice world into the design one. Expect some loss: connectors become plain lines, layers may flatten, and text can shift if the font is not available where it lands.

PNG only when a picture is what is needed rather than a drawing. It fixes the resolution permanently, which is right for a screenshot-like use and wrong for anything that will be printed or resized.

A drawing has no reflow, so a substituted font moves things: a label overflows its box, a caption stops lining up with what it labels, a title wraps onto a second line. This is the same problem presentations have, and it hits harder here because everything is positioned by hand.

The reliable fix is to convert text to curves before exporting to SVG, which turns the letters into paths that render identically everywhere. For PDF export, LibreOffice embeds the fonts by default and the question does not arise — another reason PDF is the safer delivery format.

If the drawing is destined for the web, work in SVG from the start in a tool that speaks it natively. Round-tripping between ODG and SVG loses something each way, and maintaining two copies is how they drift apart.

If the drawing is a diagram that lives in documents, ODG is a reasonable master: connectors survive, pages survive, and the PDF export is excellent. The choice is really about where the output goes, and it is worth making once rather than discovering after twenty diagrams.