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

[dorothea.per]

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

[LinSims]

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.

[Winfried Reng]

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]

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

[dorothea.per]

ok then, i did try to insert an italic format and it worked for the system variable,

but did not find a way to control initial cap for it,,,

[Bob_Niland]

By the way, what is the language in use here, and can you provide a text example of the presented, and the desired date formats?

[dorothea.per]

it was Italian and the client wanted aprile to become Aprile

[Bob_Niland]

re: Italian and the client wanted aprile to become Aprile

Yes, I see that, from a test earlier today.
var: Modification Date (long), with factory default Definition, and
Paragraph: Language [Italian], is:
aprile 9, 2021 8:25 am

The month names almost certainly have to be coming out of a dictionary file somewhere, and a full plain-text search of the C:\ drive for "aprile" found nothing. It's therefore likely to be buried in some compressed file, or a database, which might be inaccessible to an Admin user. Even if open to modification, it would only affect that particular hacked system, and not likely to result in a maintainable document.

If FM had a leading-caps capability, it would be a fix, but it doesn't.
If I had this problem, I'd look into getting a script written to address it (and that's not in my skill set, but there are such authors using this forum).

[LinSims]

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]

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]

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.

[Bob_Niland]

I suspect that the ideal solution for this would be for FM to switch to using Unicode CLDR via ICU, and thus surrender the stewardship churn for a lot of localization issues, including time & date. According to the Consortium, Adobe already does this for some CC apps.

However, as the line from the movie reminds us,
one does not simply walk into CLDR.
Right off the top, so to speak, it probably requires that the app otherwise provide full Unicode support, and FM today can't render SMP codepoints (U+10000 and up).

[Winfried Reng]

I did not check all languages. In some languages months are generally spelled upper case. E.g. German, English. Lower case: Italian, French, Spanish. At least that's what my dictionaries say. And this is the same in this date variable.

Therefore the spelling in this variable is perfectly correct.

The problem is, when the date variable starts with the month and this variable starts a sentence or paragraph.

Then the spelling will not be correct in some languages.

Why does this upper case icon which Bob mentioned does not work?

[Bob_Niland]

Winfried Reng: Why does this upper case icon which Bob mentioned does not work?

Icon?
The casing options are radio-button menu items with pull-down lists, under the Language election in the Character and Paragraph:Font dialogs. You pick one of three case forcings (none Initial Caps), and then turn it on or off.

[Winfried Reng]

Hi Bob,

Sorry. Yes. I had mixed this up. You are correct. Use these options in the Character or Paragraph Designers.

Best regards

Winfried