Convert ODT to PDF

ODT to PDF is the simplest way to send a document written in LibreOffice to a public office, a school or a recruiter, who won’t need any word processor to open it. The PDF is laid out afresh: text in 11-point Helvetica, bold headings that get smaller with each level, margins of about 2 cm. Each page keeps the size and orientation of its page style (A5, Letter, landscape…); if you force A4 or Letter in the settings, it keeps only its orientation. The document’s headers and footers are carried onto every page, page numbers included, in roman numerals or restarting at 1 when the page style asks for it, except on a title page in the “First Page” style; a chapter title in a header is that of each page. The table of contents gets the PDF’s page numbers when each of its entries leads to its heading, as LibreOffice writes them; otherwise its numbers, those of the original document, are left out, and a message says so. A watermark is kept as text in the header, not across the pages, which a message points out. Without a footer, the pages are numbered at the bottom (1 / 5). Columns aligned with tabs stay aligned: each tab goes to its tab stop (left, right, centred or decimal, with its dot leader), and header and footer pictures keep their size, except a picture taller than a third of the page, brought down to that height, which a message points out; a picture wider than its place in the header or footer (the width of the text, its share of a line divided by tabs, or its cell of a table) is narrowed to that width.

Footnotes are gathered at the end of the document; comments are not carried over, and a message says so. Pending tracked changes are applied, and a message says so, quoting the text they delete. The content of a text box (text, pictures, captions) follows the paragraph it is anchored to; a one-paragraph box set in a sentence, such as a framed amount, stays in place in its line, and a box anchored to a page is placed at the start of that page’s text. Pictures and tables placed inside a table stay in their cell, and merged cells stay merged; a long table’s header rows are repeated at the top of each page, and a table too wide for the page is printed smaller and, if it still doesn’t fit, split into successive tables that repeat the first column, which a message points out. Text and bullets in the Symbol and Wingdings fonts become the characters those fonts display (α, Ω, ☑, ▪). Links stay blue, underlined and clickable, including those on a picture. A document saved with a password is refused: save it without a password in LibreOffice first.