Convert ODG to PDF

LibreOffice Draw is the quiet member of the suite and it does a great deal of real work: floor plans, wiring and process diagrams, org charts, posters, exhibition boards, seating layouts, signage, label sheets, network topologies, anything that wants precise objects on a page rather than paragraphs. The registry describes ODG as a vector, layered, multi-page drawing document and lists exactly one program as software for it.

That last part is the problem this page exists for. A colleague, a client, a print shop, a caretaker who has to put the sign up, a planning officer — none of them have Draw, and several of them have no office suite at all. Sending an `.odg` produces an email asking what to do with it. A PDF is the answer to every one of those recipients simultaneously, and unlike an image export it stays sharp at whatever size it ends up being viewed or printed at.

Draw does not assume a paper size. A document can be set to A4, A0, a business card, a US letter sheet, a roll-fed banner width or an arbitrary custom size in millimetres, and the drawing is laid out in real units against that page. The PDF inherits it exactly: an A0 poster becomes an A0 PDF, not an A4 one with the poster shrunk onto it.

That is precisely what a print shop needs and precisely what image exports get wrong. Send a PNG and the printer has to be told how large it is meant to be; send a PDF and the dimensions are in the file, in physical units, unambiguously. Check the page setup in Draw before converting rather than after — Format, Page Style, Page — because a drawing built at the wrong page size produces a correct-looking PDF that prints at the wrong scale, and that is only discovered at the counter.

Everything drawn in Draw is written into the PDF as vector geometry. Lines, rectangles, curves, connectors, arrowheads, fills, gradients and text are described by their shape rather than by a grid of pixels, so they render at whatever resolution the display or the printer has. A diagram exported this way is as crisp on a 2400 dpi press as it is on screen, and the file is usually small because geometry is compact.

Placed images are a separate matter and they set the ceiling. A photograph, a scanned plan, a screenshot or a logo supplied as a PNG keeps whatever resolution it had when it was placed. Scale it up in the drawing and you are scaling up its pixels, and the PDF preserves that faithfully rather than improving it. For anything going to print, the rule of thumb is that a bitmap needs to be around 300 pixels per inch at its final printed size — a 1,000-pixel-wide logo is fine at 80 mm and visibly soft at 300 mm.

Draw’s layers are one of the reasons people use it for plans: a base layer for the building, one for furniture, one for dimensions and annotations, one for the version that goes to the client. They can be shown, hidden, locked and printed selectively while you work.

The PDF has none of that. What is visible at the moment of conversion is what appears, flattened into a single page, and what is hidden simply is not there. That is a feature as much as a limitation — hiding the annotation layer and converting is the cleanest way to produce a client version of a drawing — but it has to be a deliberate act. Set the visibility you want first, convert, then set it back. If two audiences need two versions, that is two conversions, and doing them one after the other is far safer than trying to remember which state the file was left in.

Text in a Draw document is exported as text with the font embedded, which means the recipient can select it, copy it and search for it, and a screen reader can read it. On a plan with fifty room labels or a poster with a paragraph of small print, that is worth more than it sounds — it is the difference between a drawing and a picture of a drawing.

Embedding depends on the font permitting it. The converter carries metric-compatible substitutes for Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Calibri and Cambria, which have the same character widths as the originals, so text set in those keeps its exact position and length. A licensed brand face that forbids embedding is substituted instead, and on a drawing that shifts things: a label sized to fit inside a box can outgrow it, since nothing on a drawing reflows. Check the labels on a dense plan rather than assuming.

Draw documents can hold many pages, and people use that in two quite different ways. One is a genuine sequence — a set of plans, a series of exhibition boards, a booklet of signage. The other is a working scratchpad, where later pages hold rejected versions, spare components, notes to self and the client’s original sketch.

Both export identically: every page becomes a PDF page, in order. That is right for the first case and embarrassing in the second, and it is the most common way a Draw export goes wrong in public. Look at the page count in the exported PDF and compare it against how many pages you meant to send. If the working pages should not travel, delete them in a copy of the document rather than in the original, and convert the copy.

The registry lists SVG and PDF as the alternatives for ODG, and they answer different questions. Choose SVG when the drawing is going into a web page or into somebody else’s vector editor — it stays editable, it scales, and it is text-based, which makes it scriptable. Choose PNG only when the destination will not take anything else: a chat window, a ticketing system, a slide.

Choose PDF when the drawing is finished and is going somewhere physical or formal. It is the only one of the three that carries a real page size, so it is the only correct choice for anything being printed. It is also the one that opens without asking anything of the recipient, on a phone, in a browser, in a preview pane, on a machine with nothing installed. For a plan going to a print shop or a diagram going into a report, PDF is not a compromise between the other two — it is the format the job actually wants.

On our server rather than in your browser. Rendering a Draw document needs a real office engine, and this page says so plainly instead of implying that everything on this site runs on your own device. The file travels over an encrypted connection to a container running LibreOffice headless, and that container has no outbound internet access of its own.

Each job gets its own scratch directory and its own LibreOffice profile — two `soffice` processes sharing one profile corrupt it, and the symptom is a conversion that never returns rather than an error — and the directory is deleted when the job ends whatever the outcome. Anything still running after sixty seconds is terminated. The free tier accepts 25 MB per uploaded file, which is generous for a vector drawing and can be reached by one that has several full-resolution photographs placed in it.

Open the result and zoom to a hundred per cent of its real dimensions rather than fitting it to the window, because fitting a poster into a laptop screen hides exactly the problems that matter. Look at the smallest text first — a room label, a legend, a footnote — and at any placed photograph at its printed size. Soft edges on a bitmap and a label that has outgrown its box are the two failures that reach the print shop.

Then check the page count and the page size in the reader’s document properties, both of which are stated as numbers and take five seconds to read. If the drawing is going to a printer, sending that PDF and asking them to confirm the dimensions before the run is a habit worth having; they will spot a scale problem in a moment and it costs nothing to ask. Keep the ODG as the master copy — it is the version with the layers, the objects and the editable text, and the PDF is an output rather than the drawing.