Date Setting in Japanese

[Andy38108926n5yf]

Hi Dave,

I happen to have a minor issue related to creation date, too.

I maintain two documents in different language, one being Japanese. 

The creation date works perfectly in English font, but after I format the creation date with Japanese font it lost the string month. What should I do to have creation date prints out the month in Japanese?

In EN font, the date would be April 2011. But here in JP font, it becomes simply '4 2011'

Regards,

Andy

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

@Andy38108926n5yf Unfortunately, that problem is above my paygrade...

[Andy38108926n5yf]

I'm quite surprised, for such a formidable publishing software FM still requires too much efforts to solve such mundane tasks.

[Bob_Niland]

What data object is the creation date in the FM document?

There's not really any such thing as an "EN" or "JP" font.
Those are usually just ISO language codes.
The month abbreviation would be different codepoints for
English (April 2011) and {per Google}
Japanese (2011年4月).
If the font in use doesn't populate 年 (U+5E74) and 月 (U+6708), it might render as "2011 4".

[Andy38108926n5yf]

Hi Bob,

I'm not quite understand what is data object of creation date.

I was simply using the built-in system variable Creation Date (Long): <$monthname> <$year>

The fonts I use are Calibri and Yu Gothic. 

1. Your ISO codes seem accurate, and I have it on my font set. How come FM doesn't print them out?

2. I've tried to add these characters into the system variable, but FM simply removed them after input.

[Bob_Niland]

Creation Date (Long) or Creation Date (Short) are System Variables, composed of pre-defined FM building blocks, such as:
‹$monthnum›
For dates, I see that there are various options for Asian locales, such as (for month):
‹$monthnumkanjikazu›

I don't actually know whether FM has a global control for localizing date formats. The
Paragraph Designer /Font\ Language
setting, for example, doesn't seem to do anything.

[Andy38108926n5yf]

Hi Bob,

Thank you for the fast response.

At the moment I have only used system variables for my publication dates.

I have tried to emulate dates as user variables, looking for a format variation, but they all failed. For example, my latest user variables for publication date prints out <$monthname <$year

And as far as I remember, I never see <$monthnumkanjikazu> building block either.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

This is a different issue from the original post. You should have started a new topic. 

[Andy38108926n5yf]

Agree.

Turned out my issue is involving multi-language, and the variable usage.