Printing the time
TeX has a primitive register that contains “the number of minutes
since midnight”; with this knowledge it’s a moderately simple
programming job to print the time (one that no self-respecting
Plain TeX user would bother with anyone else’s code for).
However, LaTeX provides no primitive for “time”, so the
non-programming LaTeX user needs help.
Two packages are available, both providing ranges of ways of printing
the date, as well as of the time: this question will concentrate on
the time-printing capabilities, and interested users can investigate
the documentation for details about dates.
The datetime package defines two time-printing functions:
\
xxivtime
(for 24-hour time), \
ampmtime
(for 12-hour time) and
\
oclock
(for time-as-words, albeit a slightly eccentric set of
words).
The scrtime package (part of the compendious
KOMA-Script bundle) takes a package option (12h
or
24h
) to specify how times are to be printed. The command
\
thistime
then prints the time appropriately (though there’s no
am or pm in 12h
mode). The \
thistime
command also takes an optional argument, the character to separate the
hours and minutes: the default is of course :
.
- datetime.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/datetime (gzipped tar, browse)
- scrtime.sty
- Distributed as part of macros/latex/contrib/koma-script (gzipped tar, browse)
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=time