Customize display date format independently of language

ryofurue
Currently the "accessed" date is displayed as in the dd/mm/yyyy format because I chose "English (UK)". But this format is fundamentally ambiguous because I usually forget about the setting. I don't live in the UK or in the US (or in any of the English-speaking countries). It's very strange that one has to change the UI language to change the date format, in this day and age of globalization.

I want to see the date in the ISO format, yyyy-mm-dd , irrespective of the UI language.

Is it already possible? I searched this archive but all answers seem to point to the Language switch.
  • mspices
    I have the same issue. I am on MacOS 10.15 (Catalina), with system language set to "English (UK)", but with date format "yyyy-mm-dd". However, Zotero is NOT picking up my desired date format, instead it just sets it to "dd/mm/yyyy" based on the selected language. (I can tell it does this based on the language, because if I change the system language to "English (US)"), Zotero switches to "mm/dd/yyyy").
    What's weird is that if I *click* on the Accessed date to change it, it will switch to "yyyy-mm-dd" format for editing, then go back to "dd/mm/yyyy" when I'm done.
  • dstillman
    Zotero doesn't use a custom date format from the system currently, just the locale. This is a limitation of the framework Zotero is based on.
    What's weird is that if I *click* on the Accessed date to change it, it will switch to "yyyy-mm-dd" format for editing, then go back to "dd/mm/yyyy" when I'm done.
    Zotero just displays YYYY-MM-DD for unambiguous editing.
  • ryofurue
    > Zotero doesn't use a custom date format from the system currently, just the locale.

    Thank you for the information.

    I've found that not only for Zotero, but basically the same question is asked about macOS. How do you customize "the locale"?

    For linux, there are clear instructions to create a custom locale.

    For macOS, relation between the System Preferences and the locale isn't clear. On System Preferences, my "short" date format is already yyyy-mm-dd, even though my primary language is English there.
  • dstillman
    edited October 19, 2021
    You don't "create a custom locale" — you just choose a system language/region, and Zotero sets the locale based on that. It's just the locale detection code from Firefox, on which Zotero is based. Or you can choose a different language from the Zotero preferences, which has the same effect.

    Again, custom system date settings currently have no effect.
  • ryofurue
    > You don't "create a custom locale"

    I'm not sure what you mean by "you don't". All I said was that you can create a custom locale on Linux:

    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/KnowledgeBase/AddingNewLanguage

    So, yes, it's possible (on Linux) to create a locale with English and the ISO date format. Then all applications that use the locale system automatically pick it up. I've never tried this but in theory this is how it works.

    There must be a way on macOS, too, but I haven't been able to find such information.
  • mspices
    edited October 19, 2021
    > So, yes, it's possible (on Linux) to create a locale with English and the ISO date format.

    That's exactly how it works on MacOS as well.

    Is this deeply baked into Zotero? Seems like a thoroughly unnecessary limitation. It should either take into account the system-defined date format, or allow a custom date format specification within the program.
  • dstillman
    As I say, Zotero doesn't currently use custom OS date settings — it just uses the built-in system language/region (e.g., "English (US)"). This is a limitation of the older Firefox framework on which Zotero is currently based. It's possible newer Firefox versions might improve this, in which case Zotero will gain support for using custom OS date settings when it's updated to a newer version of the framework.
  • mspices
    Thanks for your reply. What about the idea of a custom date format setting within the application, allowing to override the OS language/region-derived one?
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