![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/4ef22a1266a5927ed03d35e073127820.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
I would like to have reproducible PDF output from ConTeXt documents. I
tried the suggestions at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/313605/146025
but they did not work. The PDF output has information like
"ConTeXt.Time", "CreateDate", etc., which depend on the time the source
was processed at. How do I suppress such temporal information, that is
not supplied by the author, from the PDF output?
Here are my two attempts:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
$ cat example.tex
\pdfinfoomitdate=1
\pdftrailerid{}
\starttext
Hello, world!
\stoptext
$ ( context example.tex && cp example.pdf a && sleep 1 && \
context example.tex && cp example.pdf b ) > /dev/null && \
md5sum a b
6a4ac7122bb502062e7ea87be52df166 a
cac1ab3160003526e49da135d77e4eda b
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
$ cat example.tex
\pdfvariable suppressoptionalinfo \numexpr
0
+ 1 % PTEX.FullBanner
+ 2 % PTEX.FileName
+ 4 % PTEX.PageNumber
+ 8 % PTEX.InfoDict
+ 16 % Creator
+ 32 % CreationDate
+ 64 % ModDate
+ 128 % Producer
+ 256 % Trapped
+ 512 % ID
\relax
\starttext
Hello, world!
\stoptext
$ ( context example.tex && cp example.pdf a && sleep 1 && \
context example.tex && cp example.pdf b ) > /dev/null && \
md5sum a b
2116aeec2b5bed2bfd02d16332700758 a
3204a1a127f139da8d960037a8ba0690 b
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is the reason I want reproducible builds. I keep the source of my
ConTeXt documents under version control. I also keep their PDF output
under version control because I often find, several years after a
document was written, that I don't have the supporting files needed to
process it; in such a case, until I get the missing supporting files, I
can at least view the PDF output. Now, even when the source has not
changed, if I run context on it, the PDF output changes, and the version
control system reports the PDF file as modified. In such a situation, I
have to register the change in the version control system, or revert the
PDF file to its version. I would like to avoid this extra work.
Thanks and regards,
Raghu.
--
N. Raghavendra