Dear team,
I am using the date section in the Tropy generic metadata list to indicate when the document was written or signed. However, the documents that I am working on are dated after the Hijri calendar. ِِAnd as you know, Tropy only supports Gregorian dates (marked A.D.).
There are simple formulas to approximate, calculate, and convert Hijri dates to Gregorian dates. There are also websites to somewhat accurately convert your dates. But it is an arduous task to undertake, document by document, if you are dealing with hundreds of them and would like to zoom out and have a view of the timeline/chronology.
Is it possible to have a Hijri date option (abbreviated H. or AH.). Or is there a way to manually add that?
Your work is immensely appreciated. Thank you
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Do you know if the Hijri calendar is covered by ISO 8601? Tropy’s dates are based on EDTF which has been adopted by ISO 8601 and if there are provisions there for additional calendars we’d be very interested to adding support for this at the core library handling the date conversions. I imagine the main obstacle would be parsing/converting the input.
That said, Tropy currently tries to parse and validate the dates, but it doesn’t yet do much beyond formatting the dates using the current locale. So for example you can enter a date like 1346 AH – Tropy will fail to parse this using the current ISO/EDTF format and therefore the value will be displayed as is. Sorting would also still work, as long as all the values use the same calendar.
For future features (like timelines, time range search etc.) it would be great to handle this via the EDTF library obviously. Then dates from different claendars could be mixed and still appear in the same timeline.
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It unfortunately is not. Though I did see various Hijri dates packages on github such as this.
But whether this solves my Tropy issue I am unable to tell. 
For now, I am inserting dates as AD but treating them in my head as Hijri. It might get messy once I begin using European documents dated in AD.
Thank you for your interest in multiple calendars and for your assistance!
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