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Customizing Calendars
All calendar layout types in Calendar Wizard 4.0 are composed of one or several of the following elements:
- Large Calendar
- Small Calendar
- Month Planner
- Day Planner
Large Calendar is a layout element which is the basis for monthly wall calendars. It may contain the following parts:
- a title with the current month and year
- a header which contains days of weeks
- a week number bar which contains week numbers for each week of the year
- a set of day cells which may contain various elements such as:
- a day number
- any holidays and special events falling on this day
- lunar phase symbol
- the day number in the year and/or the number of days left till the end of the year
Here is an example of how a large calendar looks like:
Small Calendar is a small month block which usually used in group to create wallet or table calendars. Individual small calendar blocks can be used in other designs to show previous/next month and such. For example, on the large calendar example above, two small calendar blocks are displayed in the first two day cells of the large calendar.
Here is an example of a pocket calendar design which consists of 6 small calendar blocks arranged in an array:
Small calendars may also have a title, header, week bar and day cells as the large calendars, except that the small calendar day cells contain only day numbers and do not contain additional information (holiday text, etc). However day cell formatting may vary depending on the day type (regular date, weekend, holiday, etc).
Month Planner is a special variety of large month calendar where day cells are stacked vertically to form rows. A single month planner may have up to 5 columns with day of months flowing across all of them. There are sub-varieties of this layout where several month planners are displayed on a single page.
Day Planner is a single day layout which may contain one or two pages per day with information for notes, a timetable grid and small calendar blocks for current and/or previous/next months.
Depending on the current layout selected, the look of Calendar Wizard's main dialog changes. The tab strip at the bottom of the dialog contains several pages of controls to allow you customize the layout parameters and other options for the current calendar project. When changing layouts, some page tabs may be displayed to provide more information about the currently selected layout.
There are some standard controls which you will encounter throughout the program. Such controls include:
Font size and colors. This is a button which displays the font face and size and has a background matching the color of the text. When clicked, the following dialog appears where you can modify the font properties:
By default, all fonts are specified in relative units, which means that they are scaled up and down when the layout size changes. If you specify the font size in absolute measurements (points), then the text size will stay constant disregarding the current calendar size which may cause layout problems.
The Special Effect list allows to apply upper case and lower case effect to any text element which is useful in some layout styles.
Outline Properties button shows the line width, style and color (see the Divider on the screenshot above). When clicked, the Outline Properties dialog appears:
A Frame box specifies border and fill properties for rectangular areas of layout such as title, day cell, headers, and other elements. Each frame may have different border styles on each side or have no border at all.
A frame may have round corners provided that the border styles of all four sides are the same.
There are three choices of fill types: None, Solid, and Gradient. The frame button shows a mini-preview of actual frame appearance. When this button is clicked the Frame Properties dialog appears with frame parameters:
On the next several pages we'll discuss what parameters can be specified for each layout type.
Next: Large Calendar Grid Properties >