Issue with CreateDate or CreationDate and Weasyprint in creating PDFs

[jdlail]

Hi all:

Probably a trivial question for this forum, but here goes.

I use Weasyprint to create PDFs from markdown with pandoc.

I noticed Exiftool showed no pdf:CreateDate was present in the resulting PDFs. (This field is displayed as "Created" in my PDF reader.)

Adding

-M date-meta="date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z""

didn't help, until I modified the default HTML template to this:

$if(date-meta)$
  <meta name="dcterms.date" content="$date-meta$" />
  <meta name="dcterms.created" content="$date-meta$" />
$endif$

Weasyprint's documentation does say the creation date is "Extracted from the <meta name=dcterms.created> element in HTML and written to the /CreationDate info field in PDF."

But I'd really rather use pandoc's built in default html template instead of a custom one since this is the only change I have made to it (so I don't have to potentially update it on version changes). Is there a way to add <meta name="dcterms.created" content="$date-meta$" /> without using a custom HTML template? Maybe there is another way to solve this issue?

I am using:

WeasyPrint version 65.1
pandoc 3.6.3
Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) (in a Chromebook's Linux container)

[jgm]

You could try --include-in-header?

[jdlail]

Thanks for your response.

That seems to get added too late. I created a text file with

$if(date-meta)$
  <meta name="dcterms.created" content="$date-meta$" />
$endif$

and included it with --include-in-header createdate.txt but $date-meta$ never got replaced with the variable value.

I'll just stick with a custom template since a one line change shouldn't be that difficult to keep up with.

[jgm]

Right, you'd have to insert the date itself, since variables aren't interpolated intoo this.