[Poppler-bugs] [Bug 94173] return dates in UTC format

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94173

--- Comment #21 from Adrian Johnson <ajohnson at redneon.com> ---
(In reply to Albert Astals Cid from comment #20)
> This is looking really good, the only thing i think could be improved (but i
> can convice to ignore or let it for later) is that on a file with date
> 
> D:20050131102149-08'00'
> 
> i get
> 
> CreationDate:   Mon Jan 31 19:21:49 2005 CET
> 
> when it'd probably be nicer if i got
> 
> CreationDate:   Mon Jan 31 10:21:49 2005 WhateverTimeZone-8Is
> 
> Do you think that's doable?

I'm not sure what you mean by "WhateverTimeZone-8Is". We don't know the time
zone that the PDF was created in, only the time offset from UTC. There may be
multiple timezones that map to the same offset. 

Displaying the timezone offset is doable as unlike the front ends where the API
is limited to providing a single time_t value, pdfinfo can get the time zone
value. However I think it is more useful to convert the time to the local time
zone. It is more useful to me if for example an PDF file is emailed to be at
12:00pm, I open it and see the creation date is 11:30am, to immediately know
that is was created 30 minutes earlier than if the displayed creation date was
01:00+04.

It is useful to be able to see the time zone information in the PDF which is
why I added the -isodates option so you will see 2016-02-25T01:00+04.

The third possibility, which seems to be the one you are suggesting, is to
convert the UTC+timezone time in the PDF to the local time of the creator. ie
4:00am. I don't think this is useful. Showing times in the creators time zone
is only useful to someone in that time zone. To me it is just some random time.
It is not showing the time in a format that I can compare to other times in my
timezone.

We could add an option for displaying times in the creators localtime. But then
we have the problem of what to do if the creation date and modification dates
are in different timezones.

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