How do I change the date format displayed Zotero's middle pane?

zurpher · September 14, 2015

I am aware that that Dan rejected this back in 2009. See: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/6797/

I find the native Firefox options with en-GB annoyings. It does display no leading zero (e.g. 4.9.2015 instead of 04.09.2015). This leads to different length of dates displayed in the middle pane. I, however, try to hide the time in the middle pane as this just takes up space and does not add value for me. I therefore would welcome any solutions that allow me to have the date in the middle pane displayed in either YYYY-MM-DD (or DD-MM-YYY), ideally with no time?

APAC · December 8, 2015

I agree, either the date format should be exactly the same as the format chosen by the user for the desktop browser or should be able to be varied in user preferences without having to resort to editing about:config.

I prefer "ddd dd/mm/yy" I can just cope with dd.mm.yy I can even bear with yyyy.mm.dd but I detest with a passion mm.dd.yy or any other variation that is not consistent with least to most or most to least significant digit.

GraceKenny · September 12, 2017

I agree. I also detest the illogical order of month, day, year. I live in Europe where the convention, logically, is day, month, year. For my other, personal, files I use year, month, day, all with leading zeros; in this way they automatically order themselves chronologically.
Can we do something to improve this item in Zotero? Please?
GraceKenny

dstillman · September 12, 2017

@GraceKenny: That's not what the original post above is about, but there was a Mozilla bug in Zotero 4.0 that sometimes caused the wrong date format to be used for auto-detected locales, and that should be fixed in Zotero 5.0, so upgrade to that if you haven't yet. (Note that this applies to Date Added and Date Modified. The Date field currently just shows what's entered, though it's sorted behind the scenes.) If you're seeing dates that don't match your locale in 5.0, start a new thread with specific examples.