PDF guides
ODT to PDF: What Formatting Is Preserved
An .odt file is a ZIP package containing XML — mainly content.xml (the document body) and styles.xml (style definitions). This guide explains exactly what Looty Tools’ ODT to PDF converter reads from that XML and turns into PDF formatting, and where it simplifies rather than attempting full LibreOffice-level layout fidelity.
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Text formatting that carries over
Bold, italic, and underline (resolved from the paragraph’s and any nested text span’s style, including styles inherited through a parent-style chain), a paragraph’s font size, and text/paragraph background color.
Document structure that carries over
Headings (using the document’s actual outline level, not guessed from font size), left/right/center text alignment, ordered and unordered lists — including nested lists, with list type detected from the referenced list style — tables, embedded images, explicit page breaks, and multiple pages.
How style inheritance is resolved
LibreOffice often stores formatting on an automatic style that inherits from a named style (for example, a heading’s bold weight might live on the named "Heading 1" style rather than directly on the text). The converter walks that parent-style chain so inherited formatting isn’t silently dropped, the same way LibreOffice itself resolves it.
What is simplified or not supported
Drawing shapes, footnotes and endnotes, tracked-change markup, and tables of contents are skipped rather than reproduced. Character-level highlight color (as opposed to a paragraph’s own background color) is not carried over. Unsupported elements are skipped gracefully — conversion only fails if the document ends up with no convertible content at all.
ODT to PDF Formatting Support FAQ
- Does bold applied directly to a word survive, or only whole-paragraph bold?
- Both. Formatting is resolved per text span, so a single bold word inside an otherwise normal paragraph converts correctly.
- What happens to a table of contents?
- It’s skipped — a generated table of contents is complex structural content this converter doesn’t reproduce. The rest of the document still converts normally.
- Are custom fonts from the ODT used in the PDF?
- No. The PDF uses a bundled Unicode-capable font rather than embedding fonts referenced by the source document, so exact font-family matching isn’t attempted.
- Will a two-column layout be preserved?
- No — page-level layout features like multi-column sections are not reproduced; content flows as a single column.
- Are embedded images resized or compressed?
- Images are scaled to fit within the page margins if they’re larger than the usable page width, but are not otherwise recompressed or altered.
Related guides
- How to Convert ODT to PDFConvert an OpenDocument Text (.odt) file into a PDF with real, selectable text in your browser. Covers the conversion steps and what formatting carries over.
- ODT vs. DOCX vs. PDFHow OpenDocument Text compares to Word (.docx) and PDF for compatibility, editability, and formatting fidelity, and when to choose each one.
- Word to PDF Formatting LimitsWhat Word to PDF preserves — headings, paragraphs, bold/italic, lists, tables, and images — and where complex layouts, fonts, and multi-column designs fall short.