BCE dates

Is there any way to change so BCE dates are not offset by 1? I don't want to see year 2001BC I want to see 2000BC. It looks very awkward that way.

Thanks

Is this a question about a specific plugin? If so, which one?

Hi John, yes, the question is about Simile.
Thanks!

Is there no solution to this?

By Simile do you mean NeatlineTime, or NeatlineSimile? Either way, I think the thread title being pretty nonspecific is causing this to escape the attention of the Neatline people you're looking to reach.

My understanding (as someone who hasn't worked on or used the plugin) is that "off by one" for those dates isn't a bug, it's just a consequence of mapping negative numbers to dates. There is a number zero but no year zero, so 0 as the year in a date string means 1 BCE, -1 means 2 BCE, and so on.

OK, sorry for a vague title. Yes, NeatlineSimile. I understand why it shows dates off by one but is there any way to change it?

You'd have to check with the developers of the plugin on that front. (The "Get Support" link for that plugin links to its Github page, and you could report an issue there.)

I suspect it would be a little tricky to change, since that's kind of a built-in thing about the way those dates are parsed.

John's right: You have to offset the years by one for BCE dates for SIMILE timeline to display it properly. ISO-8601 sets year 0000 for 1 BC.

That said, I agree that it's confusing to actually display the year itself that way. I'll look into some possible ways to filter this display in NeatlineTime.

Is there a way to make it so the display just says 1000BC, 2000BC, 3000BC etc. for example and not 1001BC, 2001BC, 3001BC? It just looks silly that way.

For what it's worth, I added a ticket to NeatlineTime for this issue.

Thanks Jeremy!

Jeremy, any news on this? Actually, I see that you filed that under NeatlineTime but I'd like to have this fixed for NeatlineSimile

Hi,

Yes, I noticed that it was mis-applied late last week. I'm going to switch it over to Neatline SIMILE. We're in the process of putting together a release, but I'm not sure when that will be yet. Hopefully, this will be included in there.

Thanks for pointing it out, though,
Eric