I was doing some work on my project in Aeon Timeline, and decided to try out the new “Date” data type in Scrivener custom metadata. To switch over, I halted date syncing in Aeon Timeline, deleted the old text fields in Scrivener, and re-started date syncing in Aeon. I was delighted to find that Aeon created new custom metadata fields with the date type!
The good news:
• It’s much easier to change dates and/or times on the Scrivener side–the usual Mac date/time controls are available.
• There’s a wide range of date/time formats available through Project Settings. I was especially delighted with full support for Unicode standard date format strings. Wow! I can actually display dates in my preferred format. (“1880-11-15 14:00 Mo”)
The not-so-good news:
When I let Aeon create the metadata fields for Scrivener, they (of course, how else?) had Scrivener’s default date format, Short Date. This was problematic, because it lost my century data (important for a historical novel) and it also lost my time data (important for a mystery story.) I had to avoid syncing in Aeon, then delete the metadata fields in Scrivener, create new fields in Scrivener that included both century and time in the format (and turn off time zone adjustment! Not relevant.) Then I could turn on syncing in Aeon and be sure all my data would be retained in the round-trip.
It was a momentary bobble, and yet had I not noticed, I might have lost important information (to me) and had to restore from a backup.
In short, is there any way to set a different default date format? If not, would KB please consider providing one?