Every year, I cobble together a calendar to use at home. I put on it all the birthdays, events, bank holidays and other bits and bobs we need. A lot of calendars you can buy in the shop are very nice, but never fit enough information on to be useful to us. Usually, I do it with Microsoft Publisher, using the calendar design object; the templates all look so obvious as Publisher templates, so I pretty much roll my own.
Being the geeky type I am, I decided this year to try and use something else, particularly, something from the open-source area. For the uninitiated, open source software is what is considered ‘free’ – it’s free to download, use and do what you like with. Some say free as in beer (costs nothing) or free as in speech (do what you like with it). I’m increasingly using open source software, particularly Linux for various menial tasks.
There’s a great deal of fantastic software out there for page design, such as Scribus and OpenOffice. Unfortunately, nothing had a decent calendar function, wizard, template or otherwise. Those that did, were severely limited, so I was drawing a blank.
I decided to ask on the excellent Gentoo Forums, and I struck gold. Somebody suggested an app called ‘pcal‘. It’s a basic command-line application, which can take a plain text file with dates in, and spit out a postscript file (postscript being a language some printers can understand). It’s very simple to use, once you get to grips with the syntax, and works like a charm. In no time, I’d constructed my config file from a default one, added all our birthdays, and out popped a nice looking calendar. Simple!
It uses some nice little bits, like being able to say “45th day before Easter” to make it put in Shrove Tuesday, or “First Monday in March” for a special date that moves say. It’s that sort of simple syntax that a lot of applications really need!
I may, if I’m feeling so inclined, have a crack with PHP to make a web interface for it to make it work via a web browser and churn out a nice little pdf calendar that is easily printable. No reason – just because! If you use Linux (or Unix, or MacOS X!) I recommend this wonderful application. Like I say, it’s not overly accessible at first, as there’s no pretty interface to just click about in, but once you RTFM, it’s surprisingly simple.
