Can timestamps exported to html be customized?

Question

I want the timestamp <2017-07-26 Wed> in my org document to be exported to html as Wed 26-July '17. Is this customization possible?

More generally, is it possible to customize how timestamps are exported to various formats, such as latex, ascii, etc?

Issuing M-x org-version yields Org mode version 9.0.9 on my system.

Answer 1

If you want the same time stamp format in all export formats, then you could use org-time-stamp-custom-formats. For instance, in your case you might want something like

(setq org-time-stamp-custom-formats '("<%a %d-%B '%y>" . "<%-l:%M %p, %a %d-%B '%y>"))

This won't do anything on its own. You also need to set the variable org-display-custom-times, which can be toggled on/off with C-c C-x C-t. When it is toggled on, there are two effects:

1. Text overlays are used in the Org buffer so that a date such as <2017-07-26 Wed> will appear as <Wed 26-July '17>. (Note that the actual time stamps in the buffer are not changed, since Org requires these to be in a standard format.)
2. The same format is used when exporting to HTML, latex, etc.

If you only want effect 2, without effect 1, then you could temporarily turn on the custom format in the export hook. For example:

(defun my-org-export-ensure-custom-times (backend)
  (setq-local org-display-custom-times t))
(add-hook 'org-export-before-processing-hook 'my-org-export-ensure-custom-times)

If desired, this could be easily extended to choose different time stamp formats according to the export backend.