Printing the time

TeX has a primitive register that contains “the number of minutes since midnight”; with this knowledge it’s a moderately simple programming job to print the time (one that no self-respecting Plain TeX user would bother with anyone else’s code for).

However, LaTeX provides no primitive for “time”, so the non-programming LaTeX user needs help.

Several packages are available, providing ranges of ways of printing the date, as well as of the time: this question will concentrate on the time-printing capabilities, and interested users can investigate the documentation for details about dates.

The datetime package defines two time-printing functions: \xxivtime (for 24-hour time), \ampmtime (for 12-hour time) and \oclock (for time-as-words, albeit a slightly eccentric set of words). Notice that \oclock supports language options, but outputs what is mostly a word-to-word translation from English, and may not be suitable for general use.

The datetime package is no longer maintained and has been superseded by datetime2, by the same author. It’s not a drop-in replacement, but instead provides a set of fully expandable macros that makes it more suitable for a lot of uses. If you just need to display current time, try \DTMcurrenttime.

The scrtime package (part of the compendious KOMA-Script bundle) takes a package option (12h or 24h) to specify how times are to be printed. The command \thistime then prints the time appropriately (though there’s no am or pm in 12h mode). The \thistime command also takes an optional argument, the character to separate the hours and minutes: the default is of course :, but you could write \thistime[~h~] (do not forget to inclure spaces or unbreakable spaces in the argument in case you want them in the output).

FAQ ID: Q-time
Last updated: 2021-04-18