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 "shengxiao" (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.