Unresolved DST Transition Handling in LaTeX datetime2
0 reputation · 28 Feb 2025, 23:01 UTC
Date Formatting and Time Zones
The datetime2 package offers locale‑aware formatting through language‑specific files, yet it treats dates as static values. It can display a time‑zone name via \timezone, but it does not perform numeric UTC‑to‑local conversion or keep a time‑zone database. Consequently, the package lacks any built‑in logic for daylight‑saving transitions, leaving ambiguous times (e.g., 02:30 on a fall‑back day) undefined.
Unresolved Design Decision
Because LaTeX engines do not ship with a tzdata database, the community has not agreed on whether to embed such data or to delegate conversion to external pre‑processing. This gap is particularly problematic when a document needs to reference a specific offset during a DST transition without user‑supplied conversion.
Key Questions
- Which approach should LaTeX adopt to represent ambiguous DST times natively?
- Can a future release of
datetime2incorporate a time‑zone database for automatic UTC‑to‑local conversion? - Does the current package provide any mechanism to distinguish the two offsets during a fall‑back transition?
latex