Calendar Built With My Photoshop Script
Landscape Mode

(This page last updated December 24, 2007, for Version 5 of the script)

I've made a Photoshop JavaScript script that builds calendars. The result of running it in Photoshop (CS2 or CS3) is a Photoshop document with half a dozen or so layers that you can then tweak and modify, add your own image to, etc.

It has a number of nice features:

• It leaves the components of the calendar in separate layers, so that you can modify them at will
• It can build calendars in English or 56 other languages
• It supports personal annotations (holidays, birthdays, etc.)
• It has both Landscape and Portrait modes
• It can include week numbers (two different week-number standards are supported)
• You can have weeks begin on Sunday or Monday
• The calendar is built specifically for the paper size you select
• You can configure much more by editing the script itself

Details follow below, but first, for your downloading pleasure...

full exif & map
Portrait Mode

Overview

The script, which runs on Photoshop CS2/CS3, should work the same on both Windows and Mac, although I'll show screenshots of it with Windows.

Running the script brings up a dialog which allows for calendar configuration (page size, etc.), but a copy of the script can be edited itself for fine-tuned control over fonts, sizes, margins, etc. The result of the script is a Photoshop document with a dozen or so layers, which can then be modified/tweaked.

My goal in building this was to make landscape-mode loose-leaf calendars that my wife and I can use for our daily/weekly schedules (e.g. “preschool field trip is tomorrow”, “such-and-such a friend visiting on Sunday”, etc.). As such, I want something that is a calendar when viewed up close.... yet, when viewed from afar, it's art. That's the goal, at least.

Installing and Invoking

You can install/invoke the script in two ways:

1. Download the script file, Jeffrey's Calendar Builder.jsx, to a convenient place, such as your desktop, then click on it. It should launch Photoshop if it's not already running, and switch to it. (If it doesn't, right-click on the script file and “Open with” Photoshop.)

   or,

2. Install the script file to your Photoshop Scripts folder. On my Windows machine, my CS2 folder is:

   \Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets\Scripts\

   on the root drive. (After installing or renaming any file here, be sure to restart Photoshop if it had been open.)

   Then, you can invoke the script from within Photoshop's File > Scripts menu item:

   

Simple Calendar-Building with the Dialog

When executed, you are prompted for details on the calendar to be made:

At its most simple, just select the target year and month (or select the month “All” to build 12 separate calendars), adjust the calendar style settings and the paper size to your liking, and press the “Okay” button.

The script will churn away a bit, building the calendar in a new document, leaving you with a dozen or so layers like those shown at right.

Layers making up the calendar include text layers for the month and year text, rasterized layers with text for the names of the days of the week (“Sun-Sat” in the example at right) and dates (“1-31” in the example), and the calendar grid.

The look and feel of the calendar can be changed greatly just by adjusting the style and opacity of the various layers. Small changes can have large effects on the result. Play around. (If you come across a result you really like, please tell me about it.)

Inserting a Picture

There's an empty layer named “Paste Your Photo Here” which is where, of course, you should place the photo you want to use. Actually, it needn't be on that layer, but simply within the “Picture Mask” layerset, as the mask provides a pleasing (to me, at least) drop off toward white all around the edges.

As a shorthand, if you have an image open in Photoshop when you invoke the script, it will be placed within the “Paste Your Photo Here” calendar layer, resized so that it fully fills the canvas. This works only when the already-open document has just a single layer. If you don't care for the automatic resize, you can just delete the layer and replace it with one you like.

In any case, once you drop in your picture and move/resize to suit your taste, by all means, adjust the mask as well. Sometimes it works well when the image extends all the way to the edge, and sometimes it's better to reduce the image to the center only.

Attribution and Description

There's an “attrib” layer with an attribution for the calendar. The script puts the url for this page there, but you'll likely want to change that to your home page, a copyright notice for the image, etc. Or perhaps just get rid of it. It's up to you.

There's also an “Image Description” text layer whose visibility defaults to off. It's just one idea for an image-description note: replace its text with an image description or any text of your choosing (I used “Natalie and Alan, July 14, 2006” in the first example above) and make it visible. It'll show up in the lower-right of the image.

Copyright

You own the copyright for any calendar you make. I own the copyright on the script, but not on its output. You can change the output — the document the script creates — in any way you like.

Of course, if you add a photo to the calendar, as with the use of any image, be sure you're allowed the use the image.

Options

Some of the items in the dialog are not necessarily self explanatory, so I'll go over them here...

Language

Choose English for the month and day names, or select from among: Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Luxembourgish, Maori, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Scots, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Tok Pisin, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, or Welsh.

I pulled most of the language data from this page, and had to take a guess at what font to apply for many of them. I don't even know whether some of those are real languages. Please let me know if you run into troubles.

Week Numbers

I guess it's popular in some parts of the world to annotate a calendar with week numbers, but I'd never heard of the idea until someone requested it. It turns out that there are two common but conflicting ways to count weeks:

1. the common-sense approach (“Week 1” is the week with January 1^st in it)
2. the ISO 8601 standard (“Week 1” is the week with the first Thursday of the year in it)

In the dialog, the selection for Show Week Numbers can be changed from “No” to “at Left” or “at Right,” to indicate that you want week numbers and where the extra column should be placed. You can also select between the two methods for counting weeks.

Image Orientation

Image orientation does not refer to how you load the paper in the printer, but to what style of calendar to make. The example at the top from my brother's wedding is in Landscape style. The example with my little boy is in Portrait mode.

Annotations

Annotations (adding holidays, birthdays, etc.) are covered in a later section.

Rasterize & Merge Most Text Layers

This option is turned on by default, and compresses the many individual date-number layers (“1”, “2”, ... “31”) into one layer by rasterizing and merging. The same grouping is done for the day names (“Monday”, “Tuesday”...) and the week numbers, if you've requested them.

The advantage to this is that you can then adjust the look and feel of all the dates (or days or week numbers) at once by adjusting the style of the merged layer.

The disadvantage is that you can't adjust the font or size of the text, or other text-specific things, because the individual text layers no longer exist.

Thus, by unchecking this option, you can choose to leave the individual text layers intact. When this is done, they're put into their own group to reduce visual clutter in the Layer pallet.

Auto Save

When auto-save is turned on, the newly-created document or documents are automatically saved to files. The Directory element indicates where they should be saved to, while the PSD Filename Pattern indicates how the files should be named.

Within the filename pattern, the sequences “MM” and “YYYY” are replaced by the month and year numbers of the calendar (two and four digits each, respectively). For example, with a pattern of “Calendar_YYYY_MM”, the calendar for April 2008 will be named “Calendar_2008_04.PSD”.

Saving your Config

If you tend to always want options that differ from the defaults (different language, paper size, etc.), then set them as you like and press the “Save” button in the “Default Configuration” section of the dialog. It writes your selections to a file that's read automatically when the script starts.

Pressing the “Delete” button deletes that file, so you end up with the as-downloaded set of defaults. For safety, you have to first check a box to enable the delete button.

Printing

Because some layers are rasterized, it's best if you can print at exactly 100%, with no resizing. This should be automatic if you select the proper paper size, DPI, and reasonable page margins.

I have a Canon XP810, and find that Canon's “High-Resolution Photo Matte Paper” MP-101 to be perfect. It looks and feels like normal printer paper, albeit of a bit heavier stock. It's 100% Matte — not a bit of glossy, so you can write on it with a pencil or pen.

Annotations

You can have the script add annotations to certain dates, based upon lists found in external files. The support for annotations is rudimentary at best, but it's useful for marking holidays, birthdays, and other dates that might be important to you.

When annotations are turned on, the script reads an annotation file (the default for a 2008 calendar is “CalendarData2008.txt” in your home directory). Here's an example:

  [FontColor=0%,0%,100%] # use blue for the annotation text

  # Holidays that are on the same date every year
  01-01  New Year's Day
  02-14  St. Valentine's Day
  12-31  New Year's Eve

  # 2008 version for items with floating dates
  2008-03-09  Daylight Saving Time Starts<BR>(clocks ahead 1 hour)
  2008-05-11  Mother's Day
  2008-06-15  Father's Day
  2008-11-02  Daylight Saving Time Ends<BR>(clocks back 1 hour)
  2008-11-04  Election Day

The basic format is fairly simple:

• Blank lines and lines beginning with “#” are ignored.
• Annotation lines have a date followed by the annotation, where the date can be Year-Month-Day or just Month-Day. (You can use “/” or “-” as the separator in the date.)
• The annotation itself may have “<BR>” to force a line break so that the annotation appears on multiple lines in its date box.
• Annotation lines may pre prefixed with special “[...]” settings, as described below.

Dates without a year apply to a calendar of any year, while those with a year apply only to calendars made for that year. This allows you to add year-specific items to the annotation file without worrying that they might show up on a different year's calendar.

Special “[...]” Annotation Settings

The following special “[...]” settings may be prepended to an annotation line, or, as we'll seen in a bit, stand on their own to apply to all subsequent lines....

   [FontSize=200%]  2/30  My Birthday!
   [FontSize=50%]   7/27  Mother-in-law's Birthday

   [FontName=MS-Mincho]  05/05 こどもの日

   [FontColor=100%,0%,0%] 6-18  Red Letter Day!
   [FontColor=255,0,0]   11-22  Also a red-letter day
   [FontColor=0,100%,0]  03/17  St. Patrick's Day

If these special settings appear on a line without annotation data, as the first FontColor line in the example at the top of this section, the setting applies to all subsequent lines.

This example shows three holidays to be printed in red:

   [FontColor=100%,0%,0%] 2008-03-23  Easter
   [FontColor=100%,0%,0%]      10/01  All Saint's Day
   [FontColor=100%,0%,0%]      12/25  Christmas

The following is just about the same:

   [FontColor=100%,0%,0%]
   2008-03-23  Easter
        10/01  All Saint's Day
        12/25  Christmas

except that the any lines that might be subsequently added to the end will also get the red font. This last point brings up the idea of contexts....

Annotation Contexts

You can surround a group of settings and annotations with <CONTEXT> ... </CONTEXT> to isolate any settings made within the group from applying after the group.

   [FontColor=100%,0%,0%] 2008-03-23  Easter
   [FontColor=100%,0%,0%]      10/01  All Saint's Day
   [FontColor=100%,0%,0%]      12/25  Christmas
   2008-02-06  Ash Wednesday

has “Ash Wednesday” printed in the default black, exactly the same as:

   <CONTEXT>
       [FontColor=100%,0%,0%]
       2008-03-23  Easter
            10/01  All Saint's Day
            12/25  Christmas
   </CONTEXT>
   2008-02-06  Ash Wednesday

This might be convenient for clarity when you have various sections of grouped entries...

   # US Federal holidays are in red, with a small font
   <CONTEXT>
       [FontColor=100%,0%,0%]
       [FontSize=80%]
       2008-05-26  Memorial Day
            07-04  Independence Day
       2008-09-01  Labor Day
       2008-10-13  Columbus Day
       2008-11-11  Veterans Day
   </CONTEXT>

   # Japanese holidays need their special font
   </CONTEXT>
      [FontName=MS-Mincho]
      01/01 元日
      05/05 こどもの日
      12/23 天皇誕生日
   </CONTEXT>

   # Birthdays are noted quietly
   </CONTEXT>
      [FontOpacity=30%]
      [FontSize=80%]
       4/12 David Letterman's birthday
       4/15 Dave Filo's birthday
      12/06 Steven Wright's birthday
   </CONTEXT>

Importing and Including Annotation Data

Within your annotation-data file you can have import and include lines like:

   INCLUDE "filename"
   IMPORT  "filename"

Both allow you to reference annotations in other files, with the difference being that INCLUDE does not remember any settings changed in the file, while IMPORT does. Consider this example:

  INCLUDE "US-Holidays-2008.txt"
  INCLUDE "US-Family-Birthdays.txt"

  IMPORT "My-Favorite-Japanese-Settings.txt"

  INCLUDE "Japanese-Holidays-2008.txt"
  INCLUDE "Japan-Family-Birthdays.txt"

IMPORT is used for the Japanese Settings file (font changes, etc.) so that those changes remain and apply to subsequent lines (those found in the two INCLUDE files that follow).

This allows you to create sets of annotations that you can then easily mix and match when creating specific calendars. I use different sets of files depending on whether I'm making a calendar for myself, my folks (who don't read Japanese), or my Japanese-speaking in-laws.

More on File Management

To make it easier to reuse annotation files year after year, you can put the year in an individual entry's date so that it is safely ignored when creating a calendar for a different year.

You can also segregate items into different files, putting year-specific annotations into files with the year in the name.

In filenames provided on include/import lines and in the script's configuration dialog where you provide the annotation-data filename, any set of four upper-case 'Y' in a row are replaced by the target year for the calendar. The default filename is “CalendarDataYYYY.txt” which means that “CalendarData2008.txt” is actually read for a 2008 calendar.

The previous import/include example would be better written with that in mind, so that year-specific annotation files are read only when creating a calendar for the appropriate year:

  INCLUDE "US-Holidays-YYYY.txt"
  INCLUDE "US-Family-Birthdays.txt"

  IMPORT "My-Favorite-Japanese-Settings.txt"

  INCLUDE "Japanese-Holidays-YYYY.txt"
  INCLUDE "Japan-Family-Birthdays.txt"

Sample Annotation Data

Here are two sample annotation-data files to get you started, one with some US holidays, and another with Japanese:

CalendarData2008.txt
CalendarDataJapan2008.txt

You can find lots of info on holidays for countries, religions, and cultures around the world at TimeAndDate.com, and, of course, at Wikipedia.

Future

It's a bit more full-featured than earlier versions, but it still has a ways to go. Some enhancements I can think of:

• Better font control.
• Putting the small previous-month / next month calendars in there somewhere.
• Add a variety of layout options.

Let me know what you think.

I can't help wondering whether there's a feature of Photoshop whereby I could leave all the text unrasterized, yet allow one-stop tweaking of fonts and margins. With my understanding as it is now, if all the date numbers are left as individual text layers, each must be visited individually to, say, change the font. If there's a simple solution to this, please let me know.

At least with this script, you can make the change in the script, just once, and then run it.

Enjoy.

Version History