Reproducibility for Libreoffice (ODT to PDF conversion)

[Roland Clobus]

On 25/01/2026 23:22, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> On 2026-01-25, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
>> I've got one project where I have a few ODT files (containing
>> documentation.) For easy accessibility, I like to also present them as
>> PDF files (which, right now, are created during the build process by
>> simply calling `libreoffice --convert-to pdf some.odt`.) The resulting
>> PDF isn't reproducible. Are there known-good variants to generate a
>> PDF from a ODT file? As an alternative, I'd obviously also manually
>> export the ODT to PDF, but .. that's kind of cheating. ;-)
> 
> If it is just embedded timestamp differences, as far as I know, the only
> way to fix it so far is with postprocessing...
> 
> There are a handful of Debian packages affected by this:
> 
>    https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/issues/unstable/timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_libreoffice_issue.html

I was curious and I've tried the conversion command on a simple text document.
The most obvious difference is caused by the embedded 'CreationDate'. Setting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is not sufficient to force that value to become stable.

With kind regards,
Roland Clobus
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