Dates

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, revised, updated, and accepted dates, as well as various dates associated with online posting and publication, and 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.

This first example has 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>

Alternatively, this single date paragraph:

Received 12 August 2011; Revised 24 October 2011; Accepted 25 October 2011

yields this XML:

<history>
<date date-type="received"><day>12</day><month>08</month><year>2011</year></date>
<date date-type="rev-recd"><day>24</day><month>10</month><year>2011</year></date>
<date date-type="accepted"><day>25</day><month>10</month><year>2011</year></date>
</history>

eXtyles has some support for French and Russian date descriptions as well as English. For example, this paragraph in Word:

Поступила в редакцию: 31.03.2011 Принята в печать: 11.10.2011

yields 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>

As can be seen from these examples, 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 the first example above). 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 the Russian example above). 

The character used to separate the various elements of the date is reasonably flexible: slashes, colons, hyphens, or periods all enable dates to parse correctly.

If particular dates are not available at the time that the XML is exported, eXtyles will allow either X (e.g. XX-XX-XXXX) or two or more Ys, Ms, and Ds (e.g. MM-DD-YYYY) as placeholders that can later be replaced in the XML once the date is known.