What is it? Project goal
The goal of this project is to establish a free repository of high-quality wall calendars templates for a variety of countries. Having this repository in place will allow to prepare high-quality calendars for everybody who is not an expert in DTP.
Motivation for the project
What are the major steps to produce a wall calendar?
- Decide on the paper size and number of pages
- Prepare the Interior and Covers.
- Publish it (usually individuals use the POD services)
Format of the Interior and Covers should meet publisher's requirements. It is time-consuming and boring task to prepare Interior and Covers which satisfy them for those who are not DTP experts.
That's the reason most of the people who want to create their own calendar (e.g., based on their photos) go to the photo publishing services which make it easy to produce custom calendars. But the downside of this are very limited possibilities of customization. Usually you only can modify the photos and add your dates to the calendar grid.
That's why this project is started. The aim is to free you from the boring parts of the calendar preparation process by reusing collective knowledge (templates layouts re-usage but also getting all the holidays in place for the given year and specific country) and let you be focused on the creative tasks. But without limiting the creativity in the way photo services are doing!
Project structure
This project contains set of resources and tools which make it extremely easy to prepare your own calendar which is ready for publishing.
Templates
Wall calendar templates. Template is a set of TeX files and Makefile to build pdfs out of them. It contains two customization files - customization.tex and custom.mk.
These files shall be changed by the user of template in order to produce calendar. They contain names of the images, celebrations, holidays and other parameters of the template.
The fact that template is a set of TeX file makes it easy to make your own template based on existing one. You don't need to make the template from scratch - you can re-use existing template and modify it to suit your needs!
Resources
This directory contains the free (CC BY SA) graphical resources which could be used by ANY calendar template. In particular, it contains the vector flags which could be used by a calendar template in order to mark certain days with a special icon.
Management script
Script CalManage.pl is located in the root directory of the project. It simplifies the template/calendar management process. It allows to create a project directory for new calendar based on specific template, list existing templates and calendars.
Examples
An example of the calendar created with the help of this project is "The Four Seasons 2014" calendar, published at lulu.com.
It has the following features:
- Photo pages
- Calendar grid with holidays of different kind emphasized with different icons and titles
- Integration with the calendar web site through QR codes
- Overview page which contains all the images
- Cover page which contains all the images and mini-version of the calendar grid
It is based on the template RuEnPhoto2014 included into the project. Sources of this example are also included into the project.
More Information. Getting started
Project wiki contains the basic howtos and more detailed technical description of the project.