Matthew,
>>
We're looking at developing a screen in a gallery which would show
today's date in 8-12 different calendars e.g. Gregorian, Julian,
Chinese, Ethiopic etc. T
>>
There are essentially two different approaches to this problem.
The first, which you seem to be considering, is to look for a
programming environment (like .NET) which has a built in set of
functions for dealing with all the calendars. The advantages of this
approach is that some of the programming may be very straightforward
and you don't need to know the algorithms for each calendar. The
disadvantages are that you might not find an environment which
supports all the algorithms you need and that environment may not be
that great for producing an animated screen on gallery. For example
it would be possible using something like Visual Basic .NET but
things like graphics and installation would be much trickier than
with a language like Flash.
The second approach is to source algorithms for converting from the
Gregorian calendar to the others you need. This has the advantage
that you can use any programming environment you like but you would
need to find all the algorithms. Most of these a pretty simple, I
found one for the Ethiopic calendar with ten minutes of googling
(http://ethiopic.org/Calendars/). This, in essence, is the approach
that J Martin suggested.
The third approach, which I would avoid, is to try and find other
programs that support these calendars and try and bolt them together.
This almost never works for museum exhibits as 95% of the program is
concerned with the graphics and the display. A good analogy is to ask
someone to make you a new car out of two old ones - it'll be more
work than making one from scratch and the result won't be so good.
All the best with your project and Happy Orthodox Easter (which uses
the Julian Calendar and is this weekend...)
Joe
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