4

Not sure how to start this:

I want to print out a hardcopy diary for a year, or a period. It needs to be on A4 with say a weeks calendar at the top and a lined note area at the bottom.

I am hoping to get Latex to calculate and print the dates at the right places. So for example I can put a span of dates in the document and then generate the pages for that period so I can print them out to hand write on them. I hope this makes sense.

I can't give a basic document as I don't know how to start this one. Any help appreciated

ramonskovitch
  • 213

2 Answers2

1
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pst-calendar}
\begin{document}
\noindent
\multido{\iM=1+3}{4}{%
  \multido{\iMM=\iM+1}{3}{\psscalebox{0.5}{\psCalendar[Year=2014,Month=\iMM]}}\\}

\end{document}

enter image description here

0

I have no stamina after 14h work day to produce a MWE for you but I will give you little push. You are dealing here with two separate problems.

  1. First problem is ephemeris astronomy problem. You want to write a peace of code which will generate calendar.
  2. The second problem is a typographic problem. You want to use high quality typesetting system (for example TeX) to create nicely printed document from automatically generated text output from the above.

While doing computations (creating calendar is really very elementary ephemeris astronomy problem) is certainly possible in Turing complete language like TeX it is rather impractical. For starters TeX doesn't do floating point arithmetics so as a first step you will have to implement floating point arithmetics in TeX using signed fixed point arithmetics of TeX (Yes I know there is a LaTeX package that somebody already wrote to do this but it is silly). So how do you solve first problem. Well you can use for example Python (Perl, Ruby, Lua etc…) to generate calendar. Output should be of course plain text aka. ASCII code because that is universal interface.

Then you could use Python (Perl, Ruby, Lua etc...) to automatically generate LaTeX code from above plain text output (you really need to wrap up test output with LaTeX code). Finally you want to tex such a file and get printable output. You can even write a Make file which will automatize above steps for you.

To make things really simple I would suggest you familiarize yourself with PythonTeX of LuaTeX which are ideally suited to solve above problem.

Predrag Punosevac
  • 9,273
  • I do not think that one should start with 'ephemeris astronomy' in order to make an calendar. –  Mar 06 '14 at 07:14
  • I'm tempted to take this as a challenge for expl3 :) in these cases though, I'd agree that the easiest and most straightforward solution is to take advantage of TeX's greatest feature: a plain text interface. – Sean Allred Apr 05 '14 at 04:20