I’ve started incorporating the hour into the date fields when possible, however I noticed that most instances where I try to specify a time before 12:00 it is rendered one hour behind.
For instance if I put in “1975-10-13T11:27” it changes to “Oct 13, 1975, 10:27 AM”, not “11:27 AM” as I have written.
In fact, it’s not only one hour behind for times before noon, but every hour for that day… And it does not always do this.
Is there an explanation for this? Does it have to do with the time of the year? Thanks
These are definitely timezone issues: when there is no timezone specified either UTC or the local timezone is used; then to display the date the local timezone will be used. So there are number of problems involved in this example (time of year playing a factor for both the date itself and the time when you’re viewing it, because of daylight savings).
I think the right call for Tropy will be to always display the time using the date’s timezone (not the ‘local’ timezone), since we’re managing mostly historical data. Maybe we should even display the timezone used to make that clear?
Is there a way to specify the timezone?
I don’t think Tropy should display the time in the local timezone that the computer is set to. I imagine many of us are frequently moving between timezones, and that even more often our local timezone has nothing to do with the documents we are examining.
It would be useful to be able to handle data in multiple timezones, and then have Tropy sort out the absolute time differences and display them in the proper order. For instance I am dealing with documents with timestamps that speak to each other in a number of different timezones, so it would be useful to specify both the local time and timezone of each document, and have Tropy sort out the absolute chronological order.
You can add a Z for UTC or +/-HH after the time to set the date’s timezone. (However the display will not be ideal at the moment). Timezone will definitely be part of the date input widget which we’re still planning to add for the reasons you state.
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