Localizing dates
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Rob Beezer
Feb 18, 2026, 1:47:11 PM (12 days ago) Feb 18
to prete...@googlegroups.com
Over on -support Alexandre Lymberopoulos asks
> Also the tag <today /> gives the date in English, is it possible to have it
in any other language?
Your timing is good. I'm doing quotation marks by language.
Note that for dates, it may not just be the words for the months and the days of
the week, but also the default format (yes, we do it weird in English). So it
is a bit of a minefield. Note that we do support a handful of formats already.
I should release the quotation work in a few days. We already have a new
"ambient language" template to determine what language is "in force" at any one
point.
Localization files would need 19 new entries (at least?), templates to query
them, and then XSL code to translate the English version (which we get with an
XSL function) into the language-specific version. A preferred format could be
something like what I am doing with how quotation mark styles vary. See the
template in xsl/pretext-common.xsl
<xsl:template match="today">
Thankfully, this should be "all text" results and so could be confined to that
one file. I can provide more guidance to you, or somebody else with an interest
in a non-trivial XSL project that has a good guide to the harder parts in the
upcoming quotation work.
Rob
P.S. And for good measure - 12 hour time v. 24 hour time!
> Also the tag <today /> gives the date in English, is it possible to have it
in any other language?
Your timing is good. I'm doing quotation marks by language.
Note that for dates, it may not just be the words for the months and the days of
the week, but also the default format (yes, we do it weird in English). So it
is a bit of a minefield. Note that we do support a handful of formats already.
I should release the quotation work in a few days. We already have a new
"ambient language" template to determine what language is "in force" at any one
point.
Localization files would need 19 new entries (at least?), templates to query
them, and then XSL code to translate the English version (which we get with an
XSL function) into the language-specific version. A preferred format could be
something like what I am doing with how quotation mark styles vary. See the
template in xsl/pretext-common.xsl
<xsl:template match="today">
Thankfully, this should be "all text" results and so could be confined to that
one file. I can provide more guidance to you, or somebody else with an interest
in a non-trivial XSL project that has a good guide to the harder parts in the
upcoming quotation work.
Rob
P.S. And for good measure - 12 hour time v. 24 hour time!
Jean-Sébastien Turcotte
Feb 18, 2026, 4:27:57 PM (12 days ago) Feb 18
to PreTeXt development
Just a note that, while this gets fixed, one can use <today format='yyyy/mm/dd' /> to at least have only numbers show up. I've resorted to that in the past. This came up in the past as well:
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