If you enter a “Zweites Datum”, does the ab change to a von ____ bis ____ data phrase?
From what Perplexity.ai just explained to me, ab is the open-ended form of a date range phrase. von implies a fixed date span should be expected.
Gramps 5.2 recently added “From” and “To” date type phrases with a single date.
Early Operator Comparison development discussions implied that these would be for “open ended” date ranges. But the final 5.2 features were not implemented that way. Instead, the new “From” and “To” were made analogous to the “After” and “Before” date types that are qualified by intervals specified in the Preferences.
In effect, this means there is no way to manage a full range of dated Place Names.
You can kludge an override of the interval for a “To” with a fixed beginning date in pre-history. But exceeding the “From” interval is impossible. (e.g., the British Colonies in America became the United States of America in 1776. “From 1776” or “After 1776” is interpreted as “from 1776 to 1776+50”. Nor can you use “from 1776 to today” because the parser immediately converts the “today” to today’s date. And future dates cause validation errors.)
Intervals are probably ok for Person names because the timespan intervals in Preferences tend to cover normal human lifespan reqirements. But Place names may need to be in timespans covering epochs.