Convert ODP to PDF

More than a document and more than a spreadsheet, because a slide has no reflow to absorb a difference. Open a presentation on a machine without your typeface and every text box is laid out with a substitute of different widths: headings wrap onto a second line, captions overflow their boxes, and elements that were aligned stop being aligned.

A PDF removes the whole class of problem. The layout is computed once, on your machine, and the fonts travel inside the file — so what the audience sees is what you saw, on a venue laptop you have never touched.

Everything that moves. Animations, builds and slide transitions have no representation on a printed page, so a slide that revealed four bullets in sequence arrives with all four visible at once. Embedded video and audio are dropped entirely.

That is not a shortcoming of the conversion; a PDF page has no timeline. If a build genuinely carries the argument — a diagram assembled piece by piece, a figure revealed after a question — the standard answer is to duplicate the slide at each stage so the PDF has one page per step. It is worth doing deliberately rather than discovering the flattening afterwards.

A chart in Impress is described in shapes rather than stored as a picture, and PDF describes shapes too. So charts are written as vectors: axis lines stay one pixel wide at four hundred per cent, and labels stay crisp on a screen far larger than the one they were made on.

This is the difference between a deck that survives being projected and one that looks soft the moment it leaves a laptop. It is also why exporting slides as images and assembling those into a PDF — which people do — is a worse route than converting the deck directly.

The slide layout is one full page per slide, and it is the one this page produces. That is what you project, what you attach for an audience, and what looks right on a screen. The conversion takes no layout setting: drop an ODP here and slides are what comes back.

The notes layout puts each slide above its own speaker notes, which is the best personal reference for delivering a talk — printable, readable at a lectern, and it does not require the presenter view to work on an unfamiliar machine.

The handout layout puts several slides on a page and is what to circulate afterwards to people who were not there. Both of those come from Impress’s own PDF export rather than from here, so a deck that needs one is a job for the machine the deck was built on — and the difference between a useful attachment and a forty-page file nobody opens is worth the detour.

Send the PDF unless they specifically ask for something editable. It cannot lose a font, cannot fail to find a codec and opens on every machine in every venue, which removes the overwhelming majority of presentation disasters in one step.

Keep the ODP as your own working copy. And if the deck depends on video, on animation or on anything that has to move, take your own laptop — no format guarantees that a video will play on a machine you have never seen, and a PDF is honest about not trying.

The conversion runs a full office engine with metric-compatible substitutes for the common Microsoft fonts, meaning a replacement occupies the same space as the original. Line breaks and box widths therefore land where they did rather than reflowing.

Once the PDF exists, the fonts are embedded in it and the question is closed permanently. That is the property worth converting for: a deck that has been through this cannot be broken by the machine it is opened on, which is not true of any editable format.

Office formats need a real office engine, so unlike the image conversions on this site this one runs on a server. The presentation travels over an encrypted connection, is converted in an isolated environment with no route out to the internet, and the working files are deleted as soon as the job finishes.

The free limit is 25 megabytes, which for a deck is usually decided by the images. A presentation full of full-resolution photographs from a phone reaches it quickly, and compressing the pictures inside Impress before converting is the fastest way under it.