Kalender - a configurable printable calendar

Jussi Karlgren, December 2002

Kalender is a perl script which will allow you to configure your own wall calendar with images and your selection of holidays. No documentation (well, hardly any), no man page, write-only code. Kalender supports name days, birthdays, holidays, red days, flag days, week numbers, and new and full moon.

Kalender runs in perl and produces html pages. To use kalender you will need perl and a friendly web browser.

Configuring kalender

Perl and how to run kalender

Perl is freely downloadable from e.g. www.perl.org and relatively easy to install for computer-literate users. Perl typically runs from a terminal or MS-DOS window.

Place the kalender code in a convenient directory together with the files of birthdays and other special days you wish to use. These day files are best placed in a subdirectory e.g. named "2004". Supplementary images to the kalender code are found in a subdirectory innovatively named "images" - new and full moon, e.g.

Kalender is run by opening a terminal window, going to the directory where kalender resides, and giving the command "perl kalender".

Printing

Try to use a web browser which will allow you to print the pages without page headers.

Configuration steps in brief

First, modify the first bit of the kalendar code itself to address the following points.

Year setup (Which year is it? What day of week does it begin?)
European week or US week? (Sunday last or first day of week?)
Week numbers?
One or two languages? (For month and weekday names?)
Names of weekdays and months?
Find 12 nice images and format them to fit the calendar page.
Page layout (Height and width of grid cells, etcetera?)

Then, fix databases of special days to mark in the calendar in six separate .kd files. Example files are provided together with the code.

Birthdays
Namedays
Red days / Bank holidays / Observed holidays
Other holidays or otherwise remarkable days
Flag days
Moon phases

Code

The kalendar perl code together with example configuration files is available right here. Check the two subdirectories for year-specific files and for images of full and new moon.