NAME
rem2ps - draw a PostScript calendar from Remind output
SYNOPSIS
rem2ps [options]
DESCRIPTION
Rem2ps reads the standard input, which should be the results of running
Remind with the -p option. It emits PostScript code (which draws a
calendar) to the standard output.
See the section "Rem2PS Input Format" for details about the -p data.
This may be useful if you wish to create other Remind back-ends.
OPTIONS
-v Be more verbose. This causes Rem2ps to print progress messages
to the standard error stream. Normally, it is silent.
-p file
Include the contents of file in the PostScript prologue. This
allows you to define procedures, variables etc. which can be
used by the PS and PSFILE reminders. You should not include any
document structuring comments in your prologue.
-l Produce the calendar in landscape mode rather than the default
portrait mode.
-c[n] If n is omitted, disables the small calendars for next and
previous months which are normally generated. If n is supplied,
it can range from 0 to 3, with the following meanings:
0 Disable small calendars
1 Place the small calendars at the bottom-right if there is
room; otherwise, place them at the top-left.
2 Place the small calendars at the top-left if there is
room; otherwise, place them at the bottom-right.
3 Place the previous month’s small calendar at the top-left
and the next month’s at the bottom-right if there is
room; otherwise, follow n=1. A moment’s thought reveals
that an option which splits the calendars if there is
room and otherwise follows n=2 yields the same results as
n=3.
-i Use ISO 8859-1 standard encoding for the PostScript fonts. If
you do not use this option, the default encoding is used.
-e Make the calendar fill the entire page. By default, the
calendar is slightly smaller than the page. This allows days
with many reminders to "expand" as needed. However, if you
don’t have days which expand, you can use this option to make
all of the boxes slightly bigger. One caveat: If you do use the
-e option and one day has many reminders, the calendar may
expand off the page, losing some information. Experiment!
-m media
Set the page size. If you use the -m option, you must specify
the media type, which can be one of the following. (Sizes are
approximate.)
Letter 8.5 x 11 in.
Legal 8.5 x 14 in.
Ledger 11 x 17 in.
Statement
5.5 x 8.5 in.
Executive
7.5 x 10 in.
A3 29.7 x 42 cm.
A4 21 x 29.7 cm.
A5 14.8 x 21 cm.
B4 25.7 x 36.4 cm.
B5 18.3 x 25.7 cm.
Folio 8.5 x 13 in.
Quarto 8.5 x 10.8 in.
10x14 10 x 14 in.
XxYin X by Y inches, where X and Y can be floating-point
numbers.
XxYcm X by Y centimetres, where X and Y can be floating-point
numbers.
Type "rem2ps -m help" for a list of available media. Note that
the media type (and all Rem2ps options) are case-sensitive. If
you don’t use the -m option, the media defaults to a compiled-in
default - this is usually Letter for North America and A4 for
Europe. The "-m help" option will display the compiled-in
default.
-f[tshed] font
Set the font for the calendar title, the small calendars, the
day-of-week headings, the calendar entries, and the day numbers,
respectively. Font must be the name of a valid PostScript font.
The default fonts are equivalent to specifying:
-ftshe Helvetica -fd Helvetica-BoldOblique
In other words, the heading, entry and small-calendar fonts are
set to Helvetica, and the font for the day numbers is set to
Helvetica-BoldOblique.
-s[thed] size
Set the size (in points) of the text for the the calendar title,
day-of-week headings, the calendar entries, and the day numbers,
respectively. Size must be a decimal number. The default sizes
are equivalent to specifying:
-sthd 14 -se 8
In other words, the heading and day numbers are 14-point fonts,
and the calendar entries are printed in 8-point text.
-b size
Set the size of the blank white border in each calendar box to
size points. The default border size is 6 points, or 1/12 in.
-t size
Set the thickness of the black calendar grid lines. The default
is 1, for a line thickness of one point (1/72 in.)
-o[lrtb] size
Set the left, right, top, and/or bottom margins to size points.
For this option only, size must be an integer. It represents
the margin size in units of 1/72 in. The default margin sizes
are 36, for half-inch margins. If you wish to punch holes in
the calendar page to insert it into a binder, you may wish to
increase the left margin to one inch. In that case, you should
also decrease the heading font size to 12 points for good
output:
# This gives good results for putting into a binder
rem2ps -ol 72 -sh 12
USAGE
To use Rem2ps, you should pipe the output of Remind with the -p option
to Rem2ps, and then send the result to a printer. This is most easily
illustrated with examples:
remind -p12 /dev/null 1 jan 1994 | rem2ps | lpr -Plaser
That example creates a blank calendar for the entire year of 1994, and
sends it the the printer named "laser."
remind -p ~/.reminders | rem2ps -l -sd 18 > cal.ps
This reminder creates a calendar for the current month, filling in
entries from the reminder file "~/.reminders." The calendar is
produced in landscape mode, with a font size of 18 for the day numbers.
The result is put in the PostScript file "cal.ps."
VARIABLES AVAILABLE TO USER-SUPPLIED POSTSCRIPT CODE
The following variables are available to PS and PSFILE-type reminders.
(This material is duplicated in the Remind manual page.)
LineWidth
The width of the black grid lines making up the calendar.
Border The border between the center of the grid lines and the space
used to print calendar entries. This border is normally blank
space.
BoxWidth and BoxHeight
The width and height of the calendar box, from center-to-center
of the black gridlines.
InBoxHeight
The height from the center of the bottom black gridline to the
top of the regular calendar entry area. The space from here to
the top of the box is used only to draw the day number.
/DayFont, /TitleFont, /EntryFont, /SmallFont and /HeadFont
The fonts used to draw the day numbers, the month and year
title, the calendar entries, the small calendars, and the day-
of-week headings, respectively.
DaySize, TitleSize, EntrySize and HeadSize
The sizes of the above fonts. (The size of the small calendar
font is not defined here.) For example, if you wanted to print
the Hebrew date next to the regular day number in the calendar,
use:
REM PS Border BoxHeight Border sub DaySize sub moveto \
/DayFont findfont DaySize scalefont setfont \
([hebday(today())] [hebmon(today())]) show
Note how /DayFont and DaySize are used.
Note that if you supply PostScript code, it is possible to produce
invalid PostScript files. Always test your PostScript thoroughly with
a PostScript viewer before sending it to the printer. You should not
use any document structuring comments in your PostScript code.
In addition, prior to drawing a calendar page, Rem2ps emits the
following PostScript code:
save (mon) (yr) PreCal restore
where mon and yr are the month and year of the calendar page. The
default PreCal procedure simply pops the arguments and does nothing.
However, you can define a PreCal function in your prologue file to do
whatever you want - it can draw a background for the entire calendar,
for instance.
In the context of the PreCal procedure, the following conditions hold:
o The PostScript origin is at the bottom left-hand corner of the
page, and PostScript units of 1/72" are in effect.
o The variables MinX, MinY, MaxX and MaxY define the bounding box
within which the calendar will be drawn.
o The font and font-size variables, as well as Border and
LineWidth described previously, are valid.
For an example, create a file called "myprolog" whose contents are:
/PreCal {
/yr exch def
/mon exch def
/xsiz1 MaxX MinX sub def
/ysiz1 MaxY MinY sub def
/xsiz xsiz1 MinX sub MinX sub def
/ysiz ysiz1 MinY sub MinY sub def
xsiz
ysiz
lt
{/len xsiz 1.41 mul def
MinX MinX add ysiz1 xsiz1 sub 2 div MinY add MinY add moveto}
{/len ysiz 1.41 mul def
xsiz1 ysiz1 sub 2 div MinX add MinX add MinY MinY add moveto}
ifelse
/Helvetica-Bold findfont 1 scalefont setfont
mon stringwidth pop
( ) stringwidth pop add
yr stringwidth pop add
len exch div /len exch def
/Helvetica-Bold findfont len scalefont setfont
0.95 setgray
45 rotate
mon show
( ) show
yr show
} bind def
Use that file with the Rem2ps -p option to create calendars with the
year and month in large grey letters in the background of the calendar.
REM2PS INPUT FORMAT
Remind -p sends the following lines to standard output. The
information is designed to be easily parsed by back-end programs:
# rem2ps begin
This line signifies the start of calendar data. Back-ends can
search for it to verify they are being fed correct information.
month_name year num_days first_day monday_first
On this line, month_name is the name of the month whose calendar
information is about to follow. num_days is the number of days
in this month. first_day is the weekday of the first day of the
month (0 = Sunday, 1 = Monday, 6 = Saturday.) And monday_first
is 1 if the -m flag was supplied to Remind, or 0 if it was not.
All this information is supplied so back-ends don’t need any
date calculation facilities.
sun mon tue wed thu fri sat
This line consists of space-separated names of days in whatever
language Remind was compiled for. This information can be used
by back-ends to annotate calendars, and means they don’t have to
be created for a specific language.
next_mon next_days
The name of the next month and the number of days in it.
prev_mon prev_days
The name of the previous month and the number of days in it.
The next_mon and prev_mon lines could be used to generate small
inset calendars for the next and previous months.
The remaining data consists of calendar entries, in the following
format:
yyyy/mm/dd special tag dur time body
Here, yyyy is the year, mm is the month (01-12) and dd is the day of
the month. Note that the date components are always separated by "/"
even if the date separator in Remind has been set to "-". The
consistent use of "/" is designed to ease parsing.
special is a string used for "out-of-band" communication with back-
ends. If the reminder is a normal reminder, special is "*". The
Rem2PS back-end understands the specials PostScript and PSFile. Other
back-ends may understand other specials. A back end should silently
ignore a reminder with a special it doesn’t understand.
tag is whatever tag the user provided with the TAG clause, or "*" if no
tag was provided.
dur is the DURATION value in minutes, or "*" if no duration was
provided.
time is the time of the reminder in minutes past midnight, or "*" if
the reminder was not a timed reminder.
body is the body of the reminder.
After a month’s worth of reminders have been emitted, Remind emits the
line:
# rem2ps end
However, back-ends should keep reading until EOF in case more data for
subsequent months is forthcoming.
If you supply the -l option to remind, then reminders may be preceded
by a line that looks like this:
# fileinfo lineno filename
The word fileinfo is literal; lineno and filename specify the line
number and file name of the file containing the reminder. Back-ends
that don’t care about this information should ignore lines starting
with "#" (except, of course, for the # rem2ps lines.)
AUTHOR
Rem2PS is now supported by Roaring Penguin Software Inc.
(http://www.roaringpenguin.com)
Rem2PS was written by David F. Skoll <dfs@roaringpenguin.com>.
BUGS
All Rem2ps options are case-sensitive, unlike Remind. Any time you
supply a font name or size, line thickness, or border width, it is
treated as a string and sent straight to the PostScript interpreter.
Thus, if you supply invalid fonts or sizes, Rem2ps will not complain,
but the resulting PostScript output will probably not work.
You should ensure that the values you supply for margin widths are
sensible. If they are too big for the media size, Rem2ps will not
complain, but again, the PostScript output will probably not work.
SEE ALSO
remind