The datetime package is a LATEX2" package that provides various di erent formats for \today, and provides commands for displaying the current time. If you only want the time commands but not the date changing commands, you can pass the option nodate to the package.
Since version 2.4, the datetime package has been separated into two packages: datetime and fmtcount. When I originally created this package, I de ned the commands, \ordinal etc which could be used in the de nition of \today. Since then, I have extended the number of commands available that can be used to display the value of a LATEX counter, however it seems more appropriate to de ne all these counter-related commands in a separate package. The fmtcount package is now distributed separately from the datetime package, and will also need to be installed.
As from version 2.42, the datetime package is now compatible with babel, however you must load the datetime package after the babel package. For example:
There are various declarations that change the e ect of \today. The change can be localised by placing the declaration within a group.
As from version 2.43, the numerical date formats (such as \ddmmyyyydate) use the command
to separate the numbers. So, for example, if you want to hyphens instead of slashes, you can do:
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 2000/03/08. (You can rede ne \dateseparator to - to change to 2000-03-08.)
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form Wednesday 8th March, 2000 if the package option dayofweek is used, or 8th March, 2000 if the package option nodayofweek is used.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form Wed 8th Mar, 2000 if the package option dayofweek is used, or 8th Mar, 2000 if the package option nodayofweek is used.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 08/03/2000.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 8/3/2000.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 08/03/00.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 8/3/00.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form: Wednesday the Eighth of March, Two Thousand if the package option dayofweek is used, or Eighth of March, Two Thousand if the package option nodayofweek is used. Note that \textdate is de ned for use with English, it won't look right if it is used when another language has been selected1. If you want to de ne a similar command for another language, you will rst need to check that the fmtcount package supports that language.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form March 8, 2000. (As TEX and LATEX do by default.)
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 03/08/2000.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 3/8/2000.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 03/08/00.
This declaration will rede ne \today to produce the current date displayed in the form 3/8/00.
In addition to the above, the declarations \datehlangi are available for all languages de ned either by calling babel prior to datetime or by passing the language name as an option to datetime. See 5 De ning New Date Formats if you want to de ne your own customised date format.
The current time is displayed using the command
A speci c time can be displayed using the command
where hhouri is a number from 0 to 23, and hminutei and hsecondi are numbers from 0 to 59.
The format can be changed using the declaration
where hstylei is the name of the format. Prede ned formats are:
New time formats can be de ned using the command:
where hnamei is the name of the new format (used in \settimeformat), and hformati is how to format the time. Within hformati you can use the counters HOUR (number of hours after midnight), MINUTE (number of minutes past the hour), SECOND (number of seconds) HOURXII (number of hours after midnight/midday), TOHOUR (the next hour) and TOMINUTE (number of minutes to the next hour), and the corresponding commands: \THEHOUR, \THEMINUTE, \THESECOND, \THEHOURXII, \THETOHOUR and \THETOMINUTE.
For example, to de ne a new time format that uses a dot instead of a colon:
You then need to switch to this new format before you can use it:
As from version 2.43, if you only want to change the separator, you can simply rede ne
instead of de ning a new time format. For example:
The xxivtime format will now work like the dottime format de ned above.
This command2 prints the date in the format required for PDF les, e.g. if the date is 1 May 2004 and time is 22:02, \pdfdate will print 20040501220200. The reason this date format is separate from all the others is because the other form doesn't get properly expanded by PDFTEX. (This command is de ned regardless of whether the package option nodate is called.) Example:
Note that PDFTEX introduced the new primitive \pdfcreationdate in version 1.30.0, so \pdfdate isn't required with newer versions of PDFTEX. (\pdfcreationdate is better than \pdfdate as it also stores the time zone.)
There are two commands that print the name of the current month:
prints the current month name in full, e.g. August, and
prints the abbreviated month name, e.g. Aug. Both \monthname and \shortmonthname take an optional argument (a number from 1 to 12) if the name of a speci c month is required. For example, \monthname[6] will produced the output: June.
The day of the week is computed using the algorithm documented at http://userpages.wittenburg.edu/bshelburne/Comp150/DayOfWeek.htm. This algorithm works for any date between 1st Jan, 1901 and 31st Dec, 2099. The following macros display the day of week for a given date:
prints the day of week for the speci ed date. For example,
will produce the output: Thursday.
prints the abbreviated name for the day of week for the speci ed date. For example
will produce the output: Thu.
This TEX conditional can be used to determine whether or not the option dayofweek has been passed to the package. For example:
will only display the day of week if the dayofweek option was passed to datetime. Alternatively, you can use David Carlisle's ifthen package:
The command
displays hnumberi as a date-type ordinal. If the current language is English, this will simply pass the argument to \ordinalnum (de ned in the fmtcount package), if the current language is Breton, Welsh or French, a superscript will only be added if hnumberi is 1, otherwise only hnumberi will be displayed.
The macro3
formats the speci ed date according to the current format of \today4. (Arguments must all be integers.) For example, in combination with \longdate, the command
will produce the output: Monday 27th September, 2004.
You can ensure that a number is displayed with at least two digits using the command
New date formats can be de ned using the command:
where hnamei is the name of the new format, and hformati is how to format the date. Within the argument hformati you can use the commands \THEDAY, \THEMONTH and \THEYEAR to represent the relevant day, month and year, or you can use the counters DAY, MONTH and YEAR if you want to use \ordinal etc. Once you have de ned the new date format, you can then switch to it using the declaration \hnamei (i.e. the name you speci ed preceded by a backslash), and subsequent calls to \today and \formatdate will use your new format.
For example, suppose you want to de ne a new date format called, say, mydate, that will typeset the date in the form: 8-3-2002, then you can do:
\newdateformat will then de ne the declaration \mydate which can be used to switch to your new format. In the following example, two new date formats are de ned, and they are then selected to produce two di erent formats for the current date:
If the current date is, say, 8th March, 2002, the above code will produce the following: Dash: 08-03-2002. US: March 8th, 2002.
Note that \THEDAY etc and DAY etc have no real meaning outside \newdateformat (this is why they are in uppercase). Incidentally, the dashdate format is not really necessary, as you can achieve this format using:
Another note: in the above code, \ordinal was used to illustrate the use of the DAY counter. It is better to use \ordinaldate instead:
It is possible to save a date for later use using the command: 5
This date can later be displayed using the same format as that used by \formatdate using the command:
Individual elements of the date can be extracted using the commands:
The following commands are de ned by the datetime package:
The following options may be passed to this package:
The default options are: long, raise, dayofweek and 24hr.
If you use the ngerman package, you must use datetime's ngerman package option if you want the date displayed in the same form as ngerman. You must also load ngerman before you load datetime. Similarly for the german package.
If you want to use the babel package, you must load it before you load the datetime package. This is because the babel \datehlangi commands rede ne \today, whereas the datetime package rede nes \today to use \formatdate, and the date formatting commands (such as \longdate) rede ne \formatdate rather than \today. This ensures consistent formatting of the dates whether you use \today or \formatdate. Therefore, the datetime package has to rede ne all the \datehlangi commands accordingly. Thus the multilingual date support is mostly limited to that provided by babel. Additional support, such as the day of week names and abbreviations, are only supplied for those languages that I know, or that other people have been able to supply for me.
As from v2.56, the package options supplied to datetime override babel's date format. For example:
will use ddmmyyyy date format regardless of language. Note that if you use a declaration instead of a package option, for example:
the date format will be switched back to \datefrench or \datespanish whenever the language is set. You can use
to always use {hdeclarationi} whenever the language is set. For example:
The commands \monthname and \shortmonthname, will produce the month name in the current language. If you want the month name in a speci c language, you can use the command \monthnamehlangi. For example, \monthnamefrench[6] will produce the output: juin. Note that \textdate is formatted for English dates, and won't look right if used with another language setting. If you want a textual date, the fmtcount package (which is loaded by datetime) de nes some commands which display a number or ordinal as a word, but it only has very limited multilingual support. See the fmtcount documentation for further details.
There is currently only limited multilingual support for \dayofweekname and \shortdayofweekname (just English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and German6). You can add support for other languages by de ning the commands \dayofweeknameidhlangi and \shortdayofweeknameidhlangi. Note that these commands only take one argument which should be a number from 1 to 7 indicating the day of the week.
You can use the following as templates. Replace english with the name of your language (as given by \languagename) and replace Sunday etc as appropriate:
If you want them added to future versions of datetime, please post them on my feature request form at: http://www.dickimaw-books.com/feature-request.html. Please use LATEX commands to produce accents to ensure encoding independence. (For example, use \’e instead of é.)
TEX provides \day, \month and \year registers. In addition, datetime provides the registers: \currenthour, \currentminute and \currentsecond. Note that old distributions of TEX will always have \currentsecond set to zero.
As from Version 2.4, the datetime package will read in settings from the con guration le datetime.cfg, if it exists, which will override the default package options. For example, suppose you prefer a short date without the day of week by default, you will need to create a le called datetime.cfg that contains the line:
The le datetime.cfg should then go somewhere on the TEX path. Now all you need to do is:
without having to specify the short and nodayofweek options.
You can also use this le to de ne and set your own date styles. For example, you could create a con guration le that has the following lines:
Whenever you use the datetime package, it will now use this format by default.
Version 2.43 and above of the datetime bundle supplies the LaTeX2HTML style le datetime.perl. This le should be placed in a directory searched by LaTeX2HTML. The following limitations apply to the LaTeX2HTML styles:
This, I agree, is an unpleasant cludge.
There is a datetime FAQ available at: http://www.dickimaw-books.com/faqs/datetimefaq.html.
A
B
babel package 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
C
\currenthour 14
\currentminute 15
\currentsecond 16
\currenttime 17
D
\dateseparator 18, 19, 20
datetime package 21, 22, 23
\day 24
DAY counter 25, 26, 27
\dayofweekname 28, 29
\ddmmyydate 30
\ddmmyyyydate 31, 32
\displaydate 33
\dmyydate 34
\dmyyyydate 35
F
fmtcount package 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42
\formatdate 43, 44, 45, 46, 47
\formattime 48
G
german package 49
\getdateday 50
\getdatemonth 51
\getdateyear 52
H
\halfpast 53
HOUR counter 54
HOURXII counter 55
I
\ifshowdow 56
ifthen package 57
L
\languagename 58
\longdate 59, 60, 61, 62, 63
M
\mdyydate 64
\mdyyyydate 65
\midnight 66
MINUTE counter 67
\mmddyydate 68
\mmddyyyydate 69
\month 70
MONTH counter 71
\monthname 72, 73
N
\newdate 74
\newdateformat 75, 76, 77
\newtimeformat 78
ngerman package 79, 80, 81
\noon 82
O
\oclockstring 83
\ordinal 84, 85, 86
\ordinaldate 87, 88
\ordinalnum 89
P
package options:
12hr 90
24hr 91, 92
dayofweek 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99
ddmmyy 100
ddmmyyyy 101, 102
dmyy 103
dmyyyy 104
hhmmss 105, 106
iso 107
level 108
long 109, 110
mdyy 111
mdyyyy 112
mmddyy 113
mmddyyyy 114
ngerman 115
nodate 116, 117, 118
nodayofweek 119, 120, 121, 122, 123
oclock 124
raise 125, 126
short 127, 128
text 129
us 130
yyyymmdd 131
\pdfdate 132
\pmname 133, 134
\pmstring 135, 136
Q
\quarterpast 137
\quarterto 138
S
SECOND counter 139
seminar package 140
\setdefaultdate 141
\settimeformat 142, 143
\shortdate 144, 145
\shortdayofweekname 146, 147
\shortmonthname 148, 149
T
\textdate 150, 151, 152
\THEDAY 153, 154
\THEHOUR 155
\THEHOURXII 156
\THEMINUTE 157
\THEMONTH 158
\THESECOND 159
\THETOHOUR 160
\THETOMINUTE 161
\THEYEAR 162
\timeseparator 163, 164
\today 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181
TOHOUR counter 182
TOMINUTE counter 183
\twodigit 184
U
\usdate 185
1in fact, you may get an error from the fmtcount package if you are using a language that it doesn't support.
2thanks to Ulrich Dirr for asking about this
3Note the name change since version 1.1. The command name was changed from \thedate to \formatdate to avoid a name clash when using the seminar class le.
4To be more precise, \today is de ned to be \formatdate{\day}{\month}{\year} where \longdate etc change the de nition of \formatdate
5Thanks to Denis Bitouzé for asking about this
6thanks to Uwe Bieling for supplying the German names