Hi Friend!

I wrote this post during my PhD years ago. If it still helps you today, I’d appreciate if you take a 30 second detour to look at my current work in Science & Industrial Photography. It helps Google recognise my transition, which, in turn, would help me as an independent creator. I suggest

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Many thanks,

The Problem

While working on a somewhat larger scale document I always end up with numerous prints, .dvis, .pdfs and so on and so forth. Once, I lost all my original .tex documents and thus had to copy everything from a pdf and reformat it. In a case like that, it sure is handy to know exactly with which version you are dealing and which one is the latest. So for my thesis I wanted to add a little automatic timestamp to each print. Sure enough I found timestamp.sty. Just go to your local package repository, create a folder called <timestamp> and save timestamp.sty into it. With

\usepackage{timestamp}

in the preambel and

\timestamp

anywhere in your document, you can then add the – you’re guessing it – timestamp. The output will look like this:

2007-03-23 14:34

Now, if you don’t like this date format and would prefer, say DD-MM-YYYY, open timestamp.sty and scroll to the very bottom. Replace

\newcommand{\timestamp}{\the\year-%
\ifnum\month<10 0\fi\the\month-%
\ifnum\day<10 0\fi\the\day\ \xxivtime}

(the last three lines above \endinput) with

\newcommand{\timestamp}{\ifnum\day<10 0\fi\the\day.\,%
\ifnum\month<10 0\fi\the\month.\,%
\the\year\ -- \xxivtime\,h}

\timestamp then produces

23. 03. 2007 – 14:34 h

However, the version I use looks like this:

\newcommand{\timestamp}{compiled on \ifnum\day<10 0\fi\the\day.\,%
\ifnum\month<10 0\fi\the\month.\,%
\the\year\ at \xxivtime\,h}

So the output reads

compiled on 23. 03. 2007 at 14:34 h