If you use LibO draw to make some drawing and then export it to PDF to be used in some other document preparation flow (e.g., LaTeX), then there is a problem with the fact that PDFs exported by LibO always contain a solid rectangular box as big as the page as a background object (this is typically a white filled box). To verify it, it is sufficient to check the document with some vector/PDF editor, such as masterpdfeditor or inkscape. This background solid filled rectangular box represents a problem when in the following document preparation flow the drawing is to be imported with its bounding box superimposing to something else or on a colored background. In fact, in the first case, it ends up covering other parts of the document and in the second case it breaks the uniformity of the overall document background. Please provide an option to export PDFs with no solid box as a background or with otherwise transparent background. See also bug 81118 with reference to using LibO draw as a means to create drawings to be then used in other document preparation flows.
Selecting all objects in the page and exporting as PDF only the selection seems to be a workaround for the issue.
enhancement request. status NEW.
There is now a bounty for fixing this at https://freedomsponsors.org/issue/891/provide-an-option-to-export-to-pdf-without-a-solid-background?alert=SPONSOR#sponsors Bounty actually requires also providing a way to resize the page to the drawing and setting the artbox in PDF when the page is larger than the drawing.
The freedom sponsors site is getting spammed and there is no way to remove the spam. Sorry to say that I need to revoke the offer there.
The issue can be worked around by selecting all the objects in the drawing and exporting the selection only. While this works, it is not very discoverable. Real solution would be to: - export with no solid background if the in the page properties the background is set to none; - export with a solid background if in the page properties the background is set to a color, including white.