I am posting this here because I am using 1.9 but I suspect this is really implementation....

I recently attached a letter that had some table cells formatted for dates.  In the raw .odt file the field would appear as DD/MM/YYYY as that was the formatting set for the cell.  However on conversion using the internal UNO and in the linked pdf file...the fields would print as MM/DD/YY 

I assume that the servers locale setting for the user running OO is set to en_US.  But I cannot find where that is set or configured.  

The servers locale is set for en_AU - we are runnign Ubuntu  - locale output below

LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_AU:en
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

interestingly I ran ./swriter using x11 on a remote machine and checked the settings under my personal account on the server and it was showing en_AU but when I checked /home/myaccount/.openoffice/4/user/registrymodifications.xcu it showed 

<item oor:path="/org.openoffice.Setup/L10N">
   <prop oor:name="ooLocale" oor:op="fuse">
       <value>en-US</value>
   </prop>
</item>

So I am not entirely sure where to set it

I could bypass the issue completely and use text fields but I think the dateformatter should be correct anyway