Schools, town halls and plenty of offices write their letters and forms in LibreOffice Writer, and Linux desktops often save .odt by default. Sooner or later one of those files needs to go back as a scanned copy: a form to print, sign and scan, a certificate, a signed statement. Or someone sends you an .odt and nothing on your computer will open it.

Look Scanned now opens OpenDocument text directly. Open OpenDocument (.odt) to Scanned PDF, select the file, and its pages are laid out in your browser on the document's own paper size. Check the preview, add the scan effect, and download a PDF that looks like it went through a real scanner. You don't need LibreOffice, OpenOffice or an account.

The result is always a scanned-looking PDF. If you only want an ordinary PDF of your document, LibreOffice's own PDF export is the better tool.

What comes through

Both .odt documents and .ott templates are supported. The page is built from what the file stores:

  • Page size and margins of the document's default page style, such as A4 or US Letter, portrait or landscape.
  • Headers and footers, including a different one on the first page, and page number fields such as "Page 2 of 5".
  • Footnotes at the bottom of the page they belong to, with their reference marks in the text.
  • Page breaks you inserted, and paragraphs whose style starts a new page.
  • Text formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, colours, highlighting, font sizes, alignment, indents and line spacing.
  • Tables with borders, cell shading and merged cells. A long table continues on the next page.
  • Numbered and bulleted lists, including nested ones.
  • Pictures embedded in the document, such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP and SVG.

Tracked changes are shown as if they had been accepted, and hidden text stays hidden.

How to turn an ODT file into a scanned PDF

  1. Open OpenDocument (.odt) to Scanned PDF and select your .odt or .ott file.
  2. Go through the preview page by page. Check the headers, footnotes, tables and where each page breaks.
  3. Adjust the scan effect. Keep blur and noise low if the text needs to stay easy to read.
  4. Generate the scanned PDF and download it.

If you'd rather have images, you can export each page as JPG or PNG instead. Our guide to PDF, JPG and PNG explains when each one makes sense. With Pro, Bulk Scan handles several .odt files at once.

Your file is unpacked and laid out inside your browser. It isn't uploaded to a server for conversion, and the document can't load anything from the internet while it is shown.

What to know before you start

Look Scanned lays the document out itself rather than running LibreOffice, so a few things can differ:

  • Fonts and line breaks. Fonts installed on your device stand in for the ones the document names. Lines can wrap differently, and pages that break on their own may break in other places.
  • One page style. Every page uses the document's default page style. A landscape page inside a portrait document stays portrait, and separate headers for left and right pages aren't distinguished.
  • Tables of contents and indexes are left out. The headings themselves are still there.
  • Charts and shapes aren't drawn. Pictures in TIFF, WMF or EMF format leave an empty space, and a picture pinned to an exact spot on the page may land somewhere else.
  • List numbering is simplified. Numbered lists count 1, 2, 3 at every level, so outline numbering such as 1.1 and custom bullet symbols won't match.
  • Endnotes appear at the foot of the page, like footnotes, not at the end of the document.
  • The PDF is made of images. Like a real scan, its text can't be selected or edited. Keep your .odt file for editing.

Only text documents open on this page. OpenDocument spreadsheets (.ods) open on the spreadsheet page instead. Presentations (.odp) aren't supported yet; export them as a PDF from LibreOffice Impress first and select that PDF. Our guides to Word and Excel files and RTF files cover the other common office formats.

When to export from LibreOffice instead

If the layout has to match exactly, or the document relies on a table of contents, charts or drawings, open it in LibreOffice Writer and export it as a PDF from the File menu. Then select that PDF in Look Scanned and add the scan effect to it. That path keeps every font, page and drawing exactly as LibreOffice lays them out.

Got an .odt file that needs to look scanned? Try it now.