NAME

       lunar - a calendar conversion utility

SYNOPSIS

       lunar [-usthg5b]
       lunar [-usthg5b] year month day [hour]
       lunar [-usthg5b] -i [-l] year month day [hour]
       lunar --help

DESCRIPTION

       The  lunar  program  performs  date  conversion between the Gregorian Solar Calendar (SC) and the Chinese
       Lunar Calendar (LC).  Given a date in either calendar, the program also outputs the corresponding "sheng‐
       xiao"  (animal of the year) and "ganzhi" characters.  The date range currently covered is from about 1900
       A.D. to 2049 A.D.

       For the sake of convenience, we choose the convention such that the solar and lunar year numbers  of  the
       first  day of a lunar year are the same.  For example, SC 1991.2.15 is LC 1991.1.1, while SC 1991.2.14 is
       LC 1990.12.30.  Moreover, we choose the convention such that the solar and lunar hour numbers (in 24-hour
       clock)  of  a  date are the same, although a lunar day starts at 23:00 of a solar day. This means that SC
       1991.2.15.23 is LC 1991.1.2.23, while  SC  1991.2.16.0  is  LC  1991.1.2.0,  and  SC  1991.2.16.1  is  LC
       1991.1.2.1.

       The standard time of the Lunar Calendar is Beijing (Hong Kong) Standard Time, not GMT.  Be sure to adjust
       appropriately for other time zones and "Daylight Saving Time".

       In the Lunar Calendar, a normal year has 12 months, and a leap year (run-nian) has 13 months,  where  the
       extra month is called a "leap month" (run-yue).  For example, the leap month that follows immediately the
       6-th lunar month is called the 6-th leap month.  A (leap) month is either a short or long one, which  has
       29 or 30 days respectively.

       There  are  10  gan's  and 12 zhi's.  The ganzhi labeling of the year, month, day and hour of a date is a
       member of the Cartesian product GxGxGxG, where G = {1,2,...,60}.  For example, "jia-zi" is  1,  "yi-chou"
       is 2, and so on.  The ganzhi of the j-th leap month is the same as that of the j-th month.

OPTIONS

       Since lunar was first packaged for Debian in 2002, the Debian package maintainer has made minor additions
       such as Big5 and UTF-8 support.  More recently, lunar gained the ability  to  detect  system  locale  and
       choose the correct character set.

       Lunar  now  also  detects and displays the current China Standard Time by default, so that the year month
       day [hour] parameters are now optional for solar-to-lunar calendar conversion.

       The possible options are

       -b     output ganzhi in special "bitmap" characters.

       -u, --utf8
              output hanzi or Chinese characters encoded in UTF-8.

       -s     output simplified Chinese (for UTF-8 only).

       -t     output traditional Chinese (for UTF-8 only).

       -g, -h, --gb
              output hanzi or Chinese characters encoded in (highest-bit-set) GB code.

       -5, --big5
              output hanzi or Chinese characters encoded in Big5.

       -i     convert a lunar date to solar date.  The default is to convert a solar date to a lunar date.

       -l     indicate the month is a lunar leap month.  This option is meaningful only when the "-i" option  is
              used.

       --help Print a help message.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 2001 Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung

       This  program  is  free  software;  you  can  redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
       General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License,  or
       any later version.

       This  program  is  distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
       the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General  Public
       License for more details.

       You  should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write
       to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

       The last version of this program was released on July 23, 1992 as version 2.1a.  This program  was  first
       released  under  the  terms  of  GNU  GPL on October 28, 2001 as version 2.2. Both versions are identical
       except for the license text.

AUTHORS

       Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

       The special "bitmap" file "lunar.bitmap" was contributed by Weimin Liu.

       Special thanks to Hwei Chen Ti who extended the tables from 2001 to 2049.

BUGS

       Bug reports and comments should be sent to lee@umunhum.stanford.edu.

DISCLAIMER

       This software has no connection with our employers.