ODT to PDF Converter

OpenDocument Text is the native format of LibreOffice Writer, Apache OpenOffice and Collabora Office, and a number of public administrations and schools have adopted it as their standard. Inside those programs it works perfectly. The difficulty starts when the document goes to someone else: a recruiter who uses Word, a client on a Mac, a phone that previews PDF but not .odt, an upload form that lists only PDF and DOCX.

A PDF keeps the pages as you designed them. Fonts are embedded, paragraphs break where they broke on your screen, and footnotes, tables of contents, headers and page numbers stay in place. The reader needs nothing more than a browser.

Sending a PDF also stops accidental edits. A reviewer can still annotate it, but nobody's word processor will quietly reflow your chapters or swap your fonts before printing. For CVs, applications and anything else where first impressions count, that certainty is worth the extra step.

Text documents are only part of OpenDocument. Spreadsheets (.ods) and presentations (.odp) follow the same standard and convert on this page as well, along with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, EPUB and plain text. The full list of files the Convert to PDF tool accepts is below; mixed batches are fine, and every file comes out as its own PDF.

That makes the page handy for teams that work in LibreOffice but report to people who do not. A folder with a written report, a budget spreadsheet and a slide deck can go in as one batch of up to 20 files and come back as matching PDFs. If you would rather hand over an editable Word file than a PDF, the Document Converter page turns .odt into .docx instead.

Long documents such as theses, manuals and reports are much easier to read when the PDF has an outline. Writer documents that use the built-in Heading paragraph styles already contain that outline, and this page turns it into PDF bookmarks: Heading 1 entries at the top level, Heading 2 and 3 nested below them. Readers can then jump from chapter to chapter in the sidebar of any PDF viewer.

If your bookmarks come out empty, the headings were probably formatted by hand, with bold and a larger size, rather than with heading styles. Apply the styles in Writer, save, and convert again; the table of contents in the document benefits too.

Other parts of a Writer document carry over as well. Internal links from a table of contents to its chapters stay clickable, web links remain active, and footnotes keep their numbers. Comments and recorded changes are left out unless you switch on Include comments, so the reader sees the finished text, and Remove metadata can drop the author name and editing time saved in the file.

This page uses A4, the paper LibreOffice uses by default in most regions outside North America. For a document set up on US Letter, switch Page size before converting, or choose Same as source to keep whatever each file defines. Margins follow the document unless you set them under Page layout.

Organizations that chose OpenDocument because it is an open standard often want their PDFs to be archival too. Select PDF/A at the top of the tool to get a file that embeds every font and can be read decades from now; to convert existing PDFs instead, use PDF to PDF/A. The specifications behind all three formats are public: