31.13.7 Diary Entries Using non-Gregorian Calendars

As well as entries based on the standard Gregorian calendar, your diary can have entries based on Bahá’í, Chinese, Hebrew, or Islamic dates. Recognition of such entries can be time-consuming, however, and since most people don’t use them, you must explicitly enable their use. If you want the diary to recognize Hebrew-date diary entries, for example, you must do this:

(add-hook 'diary-nongregorian-listing-hook 'diary-hebrew-list-entries)
(add-hook 'diary-nongregorian-marking-hook 'diary-hebrew-mark-entries)

Similarly, for Islamic, Bahá’í and Chinese entries, add diary-islamic-list-entries and diary-islamic-mark-entries, diary-bahai-list-entries and diary-bahai-mark-entries, or diary-chinese-list-entries and diary-chinese-mark-entries.

These diary entries have the same formats as Gregorian-date diary entries; except that diary-bahai-entry-symbol (default ‘B’) must precede a Bahá’í date, diary-chinese-entry-symbol (default ‘C’) a Chinese date, diary-hebrew-entry-symbol (default ‘H’) a Hebrew date, and diary-islamic-entry-symbol (default ‘I’) an Islamic date. Moreover, non-Gregorian month names may not be abbreviated (because the first three letters are often not unique). (Note also that you must use “Adar I" if you want Adar of a common Hebrew year.) For example, a diary entry for the Hebrew date Heshvan 25 could look like this:

HHeshvan 25 Happy Hebrew birthday!

and would appear in the diary for any date that corresponds to Heshvan 25 on the Hebrew calendar. And here is an Islamic-date diary entry that matches Dhu al-Qada 25:

IDhu al-Qada 25 Happy Islamic birthday!

As with Gregorian-date diary entries, non-Gregorian entries are nonmarking if preceded by diary-nonmarking-symbol (default ‘&’).

Here is a table of commands used in the calendar to create diary entries that match the selected date and other dates that are similar in the Bahá’í, Chinese, Hebrew, or Islamic calendars:

i h d

diary-hebrew-insert-entry

i h m

diary-hebrew-insert-monthly-entry

i h y

diary-hebrew-insert-yearly-entry

i i d

diary-islamic-insert-entry

i i m

diary-islamic-insert-monthly-entry

i i y

diary-islamic-insert-yearly-entry

i B d

diary-bahai-insert-entry

i B m

diary-bahai-insert-monthly-entry

i B y

diary-bahai-insert-yearly-entry

i C d

diary-chinese-insert-entry

i C m

diary-chinese-insert-monthly-entry

i C y

diary-chinese-insert-yearly-entry

i C a

diary-chinese-insert-anniversary-entry

These commands work much like the corresponding commands for ordinary diary entries: they apply to the date that point is on in the calendar window, and what they do is insert just the date portion of a diary entry at the end of your diary file. You must then insert the rest of the diary entry. The basic commands add an entry for the specific non-Gregorian date, the ‘monthly’ commands for the given non-Gregorian day-within-month in every month, and the ‘yearly’ commands for the given non-Gregorian day and month in every year.