A Reproducible DOCX-to-PDF Resume Export with LibreOffice Headless

I needed a stable PDF from a Word-list-formatted resume on macOS. The obvious path was to open the DOCX in Pages and export it, but the resulting artifact failed two checks that mattered for this submission: repeatable layout and an intact searchable text layer.

This is one document and toolchain, not a universal renderer comparison. The useful part is the verification pipeline: it turns a visual export into an artifact I can check before sending.

What failed in the Pages path

Two fresh imports of the same committed DOCX produced different page-two layouts. One looked correct; the other displaced list markers to the end of a previous bullet.

The searchable text also changed. pdftotext split terms such as Airflow into Air ow and Actions into Ac ons, with a large token-count difference from the source mirror. A human could still infer the words visually, but a parser would receive different text.

One OOXML detail contributed to the layout behavior. In this file, paragraph_format.keep_with_next = False produced <w:keepNext w:val="0"/>, while removing the element with None avoided the problem in Pages. That observation is version- and document-specific, so I kept it in the test case rather than treating it as a general OOXML rule.

Export with LibreOffice headless

For this document, LibreOffice headless produced repeatable layout and intact searchable text:

brew install --cask libreoffice
/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless 
  --convert-to pdf --outdir "$OUT_DIR" resume.docx

LibreOffice documents --headless, --convert-to, and --outdir, which makes the renderer suitable for a scripted export. The command alone is not the gate, though. I still verified the resulting file.

Verify the artifact, not the command

The check had four parts:

1. Repeatability: convert twice; compare per-page raster hashes (PyMuPDF page.get_pixmap(dpi=140).samples md5).
2. Dual-renderer visual check: rasterize with PyMuPDF and Poppler (pdftoppm), then inspect every page.
3. Text-layer regression scan: pdftotext file.pdf - | grep -cE "Air ow|Ac ons|real- me" must be 0; spot-check that important terms survived intact.
4. Token parity: normalized word-token count of pdftotext output must match the source text mirror, with reviewed exceptions for line-break hyphenation.

Hash equality across two conversions is useful evidence of repeatability, but it does not prove visual correctness. That is why the visual and text-layer checks remain separate.

Practical takeaway

This workflow fits automated DOCX-to-PDF exports where both layout and searchable text matter. Keep the DOCX as the editable source and the verified PDF as a frozen submission artifact; any source edit invalidates the PDF and restarts the checks.

For a document that only humans will read, the four-part gate may be more than you need. For a new template, font set, or application version, rerun the comparison instead of assuming this result still holds.