yplan.doc ------------ Date: 14th March, 2000 -------------------- This is the documentation for the Perl program yplan. Yplan is a vertical-type daily planner, showing all the days of a year on two A4 pages. %% -------------------------------------------- %% Copyright 1999 RWD Nickalls & Harald Harders, 2000 John Palmer %% This program can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms %% of the LaTeX Project Public License Distributed from CTAN %% archives in directory macros/latex/base/lppl.txt; either %% version 1 of the License, or any later version. %% --------------------------------------------- Authors: Dr RWD Nickalls, Department of Anaesthesia, City Hospital, Nottingham, UK. dicknickalls@compuserve.com TEL: +44-(0)-115-9691169 Ext:45637 FAX: +44-(0)-115-9627713 Harald Harders harald.harders@dlr.de John Palmer 4 Horyford Close, Preston, Weymouth DT3 6DJ, England +44 1305 832240 johnp@bcs.org.uk http://www.stx69.demon.co.uk/ The file yplan, in CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/other/yplan/, is a Perl program which generates LaTeX2e code to print, for any chosen year from 1999 onward, a vertical-type daily planner (ie months along the top, days downwards), with each 6-month period fitting onto a single A4 sheet. They will also fit onto USA standard size paper. The vertical size can be adjusted by changing \datestrut. The generated files are really just large tables, and so you may wish to extract just the tables and modify them for your own use. Dick Nickalls was motivated to design this year-planner as his A4 diary did not have good year-planner at the end. Harald Harders added support for several languages besides English, in the form of a LaTeX2e package yplan.sty. Hand-edited LaTeX files for 1999 and 2000 were issued, called yplan99a.tex, etc. (These are not made obsolete by the new program; they remain useful, for instance to those who don't have a Perl interpreter.) John Palmer then wrote the general Perl program which makes a LaTeX file for any chosen year. In doing so he incorporated Harald's alternative language support into the Perl code, in such a way that the yplan.sty file is no longer needed, and added the Swedish and Latin languages. The Perl code has been tested with perl 5.004 and 5.005, but should run with many earlier versions of Perl. It has been used successfully on both Linux and MS-DOS. The output from yplan runs nicely on LaTeX2e, and may have to be adjusted very slightly to run on LaTeX 2.09. Here are the instructions for running yplan: The normal usage is yplan LANGUAGE LETTERCASE PAGE YEAR >FILE.tex where: LANGUAGE is one of: english, german, french, italian, spanish, portuguese, swedish, latin. If LANGUAGE is omitted, english is assumed. LETTERCASE is one of: uppercase, lowercase. This controls the setting of month-names. If LETTERCASE is omitted, uppercase is assumed. PAGE is one of: p1, p2. This selects the first or second six months of the chosen YEAR; if PAGE is omitted, both pages are printed. YEAR must be written with four digits. YEAR may NOT be omitted. FILE.tex is where to put the generated LaTeX code. (The output of the program must be redirected to some file that can be processed by LaTeX.) The following variants on this syntax are accepted: Arguments wholly or partly in uppercase are translated to lowercase. Arguments are recognised even if given in the wrong order. You may write any argument with - or / at the start, and, in general, obvious extra characters at start and end of arguments are ignored. Fatal errors: The program will stop with an error-message in these cases: if no YEAR is specified (in this case it prints a message showing the correct way to use the program); if YEAR < 1999 (years before 1999 are not provided for); if LANGUAGE is specified but is not one of the set given above. ------------------------------------------ Dick Nickalls, Harald Harders, John Palmer