Date format for the Timelines plugin

[MissyLaMotte]

Hi,

I am trying to get the Timelines plugin to work for my project. The problem is, that my novel is set in the time of the early Roman empire, so I need my timeline to be able

to display events from around 40 BC to 20 AD. Is there any way to enter dates before the year 0? Also, even for the first 100 years AD it does not work. When my datestring starts with two leading zeros, it always interprets it as 19.. So when I enter a date like

00090917 (which would be the date of the battle in the Teutoburg forest), the timeline wiki renders it as 1909. For the year 0109 it works correctly.

Are there any solutions for this? If the date format itself does not allow the dates to be BC, is there a way to use current dates (like, set everything 2000 years in the future) in the date field so that the macro knows how to space and order them and then display a text string with the correct date from another field in the view instead?

Thanks,

Jutta

[Eskha]

Hello Jutta,

What is working for me: I use "Y" format for date and a "-" in front of the date (eg -200 for 200 BC).

Best regards,

Eskha

[MissyLaMotte]

Hello Eskha,

yes, thank you, indeed, the minus works for me, too. It is a bit confusing because it takes the place of the first year digit, so the earliest year you can do is -999, but that's fine for my purpose. But I still cannot get the first century AD to work. Any year with two leading zeroes is interpreted as 19..Is there a trick for that somehow?

Thanks,

Jutta

[TW Tones]

Jutta,

I have never had to deal with such old dates, but if you primarily just want to assign years, and no need to check or test months of the year, days of the month then rather than use a date field perhaps just have a year field? Basically treat BC as another number in a field. In reality the systems behind different historical calendars, changes in interpretation, leap years ands non leap millennia reduce the accuracy of most date system too far back. To handle this correctly one would need a fit for purpose calendar extension, but if your resolution is only to the year you could just use a number, and perhaps a sequence number if something is known to proceed or follow another in the same year.

Regards

Tones

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Jutta

I’ve been able to make one quick adjustment to fix the handling of dates between 0 and 100AD:

https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/commit/fe8606759ebf1db50c57a2e779b086a6d7df2ae6

You can try it out on the prerelease here:

https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease

I’ll have a look to see if we can do something about handling negative dates correctly.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

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[Jeremy Ruston]

I’ve made some further adjustments to support working with negative dates:

https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/#DateFormat:%5B%5BDate%20Fields%5D%5D%20DateFormat

Let me know how it goes,

Best wishes

Jeremy.