how can i uppercase first letter in a variable that uses current month?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
April 7, 2021
3 replies
1034 views

how can i uppercase first letter in a variable that uses current month?
where is this info dragged from?

This topic has been closed for replies.

LinSims

Community Expert

I wonder if the issue is with the dictionaries. I just tested most of the languages available, and I can't see a pattern to why sometimes it's initial-capped and sometimes it isn't. (German is, French and Italian aren't, Finnish isn't but Polish is ... it's a mess!)

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

LinSims: … can't see a pattern …

And even if this is a result of cultural traditions regarding whether month names are "proper", it would cause a problem if such a date started a sentence. FM needs an enhancement to deal with this.

I've been using only ISO 8601 date formats since before Y2K, so this is all new to me. 2021-04-09 is as close to universal and unambiguous as we can get.

LinSims

Community Expert

Yeah, and I don't use the system variables for dates, so it's new to me, also.

As I recall, if something is considered a proper noun, then you use its preferred capitalization whether it starts a sentence or not, although good practice is to rewrite the sentence so the issue doesn't come up. "eBay" for instance, if it started a sentence out, would have a lowercase "e" despite its position.

Other than long distant memories of Spanish, I don't speak any language other than English, though, so I have no idea how they treat the names of months or days. As I recall, Spanish capitalizes the days of weeks and months, but that's not how FM treats it.

It's very peculiar.

W

Winfried Reng

Community Expert

The month name and also the upper/lower case spelling is derived from the paragraph language.

I think that you cannot control yourself, whether the month starts with an upper or lower case character.

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

The display of these variable building blocks (at least in English) can be controlled by the caps options in Character and/or Paragraph format, but the options are limited to:
Small Caps
Lowercase
Uppercase

LinSims

Community Expert

Are you asking how to change the name of the variable, or are you asking how to ensure that the name of the month brought in by the variable is initial capped?

FrameMaker has a number of predefined system variables for inserting dates and times, including Creation Date and Modification Date. You can modify which building blocks are used in each of the system variables but cannot rename the variables themselves. The building blocks pulls their values from the computer's clock/calendar, and the names are brought in correctly capitalized.

The building blocks for time and date are not usable in user created variables.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded