Picking a clock picks its separator too

24-hour read as 13.45 in Denmark, because that is how Danish writes a
clock and toLocaleTimeString was doing as it was told. But somebody who
leaves "follow the region" and picks 24-hour has just said they want the
region to stop deciding — and they mean 13:45.

So the two explicit modes build the string from formatToParts and pin the
mark between the hour and the minute. Only that one literal is replaced:
everything else stays the locale's, which is why Japanese keeps 午後 in
front of it and English keeps its lowercase pm after. 12-hour got the
same for free — it had the identical 01.45 pm.

Auto is left alone. A setting that says to follow the region has no
business arguing with it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Web App/web/src/lib/format.js

@@ -92,9 +92,27 @@ export function formatTime(value) {
   const d = value instanceof Date ? value : new Date(value);
   if (isNaN(d)) return "—";
   const opts = { hour: "2-digit", minute: "2-digit" };
-  if (prefs.timeFormat === "24") opts.hourCycle = "h23";
+  const mode = prefs.timeFormat;
-  else if (prefs.timeFormat === "12") opts.hourCycle = "h12";
+  if (mode !== "24" && mode !== "12") {
-  return d.toLocaleTimeString(prefs.locale || undefined, opts);
+    // Auto is the region's, whole: 13.45 is how Danish writes a clock, and a
+    // setting that says "follow the region" has no business arguing with it.
+    return d.toLocaleTimeString(prefs.locale || undefined, opts);
+  }
+
+  // Asking for a clock outright is asking for its separator too. Somebody who
+  // picked "24-hour" means 13:45, not the 13.45 their region would have written
+  // — the point of leaving auto was to stop the region deciding. Only the mark
+  // between the hour and the minute is pinned: the rest is still the locale's,
+  // including whether there is an am/pm marker, what it reads and where it sits.
+  opts.hourCycle = mode === "24" ? "h23" : "h12";
+  const parts = new Intl.DateTimeFormat(prefs.locale || undefined, opts).formatToParts(d);
+  return parts
+    .map((p, i) =>
+      p.type === "literal" && parts[i - 1]?.type === "hour" && parts[i + 1]?.type === "minute"
+        ? ":"
+        : p.value
+    )
+    .join("");
 }
 
 // Every number we render goes through here so the grouping separator follows