In your eXtyles configuration, you may collect dates associated with the manuscript as part of the Document Information dialog. These dates will generally be incorporated directly into the article or book section metadata within the XML file on export.

However, dates associated with the publication process may also be included in the Word file to be rendered in print.

Publishers may include dates associated with the manuscript history in a single paragraph or in separate paragraphs.

eXtyles will automatically identify:

received dates
revised dates
updated dates
accepted dates
various dates associated with online posting and publication

then apply the appropriate attribute to the date in the XML file.

All of this identification can be done without any special markup in the Word file. The key to this process is the consistent use of wording to identify each date.

As can be seen in the examples below, eXtyles automatically parses the date into day, month, and year elements.

This process is most robust if months are spelled out as words or as abbreviations (both English and French month names are supported) and years are given as four digits.

Dates given in the form XXXX-XX-XX (e.g. 2012-05-11) will be parsed as YYYY-MM-DD, i.e. 11th May not 5th November (see Example 1). If months are given as digits (e.g. 12-08-2010 or 12-08-10), by default, eXtyles will identify the date as MM-DD-YY(YY), i.e. U.S. date format—December 8th, 2010, and will warn that the date is ambiguous.

It is possible to modify the export to omit the warning (if international date format is never encountered) or to treat the international date format [i.e. DD-MM-YY(YY)] as the default (see Example 3 for a Russian example).

In this section

The character used to separate the various elements of the date is reasonably flexible. All of the following enable dates to parse correctly:

slashes
colons
hyphens
periods

If particular dates are not available at the time that the XML is exported, eXtyles will allow placeholder text that can later be replaced in the XML once the date is known. The two supported placeholder are:

X (e.g. XX-XX-XXXX)
two or more Ys, Ms, and Ds (e.g. MM-DD-YYYY)

Example 1:

Three date paragraphs, all styled as "Document_Date":

Created: 1998-08-31

Updated: 2010-09-14

Revised: 2011-06-16

This example yields the following XML on export:

<history>
<date date-type="created"><day>31</day><month>08</month><year>1998</year></date>
<date date-type="updated"><day>14</day><month>09</month><year>2010</year></date>
<date date-type="revised"><day>16</day><month>06</month><year>2011</year></date>
</history>

Contact eXtyles Support if you have questions about date formats.

Example 2

Single date paragraph:

Received: 1 March 2016; Revised 14 March 2016; Accepted 21 March 2016

Screenshot in Draft View of the received, revised, accepted dates above, though the screenshot uses US date format. The paragraph style used is 'History'

which yields this XML:

<history>
<date date-type="received"><day>01</day><month>03</month><year>2016</year></date>
<date date-type="rev-recd"><day>14</day><month>03</month><year>2016</year></date>
<date date-type="accepted"><day>21</day><month>03</month><year>2016</year></date>
</history>

Example 3

Screenshot in Draft View of the translated dates above. The paragraph style used for both lines is 'History'

yield this XML:

<history>
<date date-type="received"><day>31</day><month>03</month><year>2011</year></date>
<date date-type="accepted"><day>11</day><month>10</month><year>2011</year></date>
</history>