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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

For the last 3 years I've been printing several copies of the Compact Calendar by David Seah [1]. It's as its name implies a compact form calendar that spans the whole year in a single page, and leaves enough side space to annotate stuff as needed.

It's very cool and useful, although it would be nice having an open-source based version (i.e. LibreOffice), for those of us that don't have an MS Office license...

[1]: https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/

(not sure why but upon checking the website I'm seeing all text and links scrambled in the page, probably the author inadvertently broke it during an update)

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Oh cool! I happened to build something similar a while back, because I was frustrated with the way that the Unix `cal` program laid out all the months in a 3 x 4 grid instead of in a continuous format:

https://github.com/jez/calz

So for example to get the same year-long calendar view as the Compact Calendar would have, I can type

    calz 2020

calz has a couple other features too which make it nicer to use than `cal`, but those are beside the point.

I have calz now. Thanks!

Now I just need a really long e-ink screen.

Wow I just discovered that it's uBlock Origin that totally breaks the page layout. Which means that for some reason this page's CSS are detected as an ad source, and blocked! Curious, as it seems to be a plain and simple static site.

EDIT: It is the "AdGuard Annoyances" optional list, which is disabled by default but I like to enable: https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/adguard-ad-filters#annoyan...

It's also blocked by Fanboy's annoyances list. It's a generic blocker, /wp-gdpr, probably designed to block a Wordpress plugin's GDPR banner. My guess is this site is using such a plugin, and then stuck the rest of its CSS in the plugin's folder instead of a generic folder like CSS, so it ends up blocked there too. You can whitelist this URL on the site if you want without having to whitelist the site as a whole.

What do you mean “open source”? XLS is the (previously proprietary) format used by older versions that’s (basically) just serialized structs. XLSX (which I see here) is the ZIP/XML based version based on an open standard[0][1]. LibreOffice opens those just fine from my experience; It’s the older binary format that LibreOffice can screw up with formatting.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

[1]: ECMA-376, http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

You are right although as I understood it, the MS standard is exceedingly complicated, some would say in an attempt to "obfuscate" it.

In any case, this specific excel template states that it requires Excel 2007 and might misbehave if using any other program such as OpenOffice or Google Sheets:

> Please note that Microsoft Excel 2007 or newer is required. Other software like Open Office, Google Docs, and Numbers may import the Excel spreadsheet, but due to differences in the way they handle dates you should double-check that the calendars are correct.

Perhaps things have gotten better, but OOXML is not an open format by the normal usage of the word (text based does not mean open). OOXML was rushed through the standardization process, and was entirely created by one vendor (Microsoft).

Microsoft doesn't even bother to support the OOXML format completely, as the Wikipedia article notes.

> OOXML is not an open format by the normal usage of the word

It's a poor standard (including, iirc, normative references to behavior of particular proprietary software), but it's standardized and free to use.

Thank goodness – you've brought up David Seah! I used to use his stationery religiously, but forgot his name. I appreciate it!

I print a bunch of these (sometimes multiple calendars on a page) and stick them up on the wall. Very useful to separate events / agendas of different classes on separate calendars e.g. birthdays, travel plans, project deadlines, appointments, goal tracking, habit tracking all go on different calendars but on the same wall.

Much cleaner than putting them all on the same calendar and fight for space.

I'm thinking of doing it on tracing paper so I can overlay one over the other to check for double booking.

not open source (and not the above calendar), but similar and useful if you're not on windows: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/2/d/1m1IWh6Mmli8K20Dd...

[+ attribution] Many thanks to Pedro Pablo Fuentes Schuster for this Google Sheets conversion! http://pedrofuent.es/

Nice, thanks!

It renders fine for me in Firefox, but garbled in Chrome. Disabling this CSS rule "fixes" the layout for me in Chrome, without breaking anything obvious in Firefox:

@media (min-width: 500px) .calendar td, .calendar th { max-width: 0; }

I'm not actually sure what benefit that rule provides in the first place, but I haven't done any serious CSS hacking in forever.

It certainly makes the year look a lot smaller than usual, when all the days are printed in 1/3 of a standard paper size.

not having the days of the week in close visual proximity to the dates makes utilizing this layout pretty tedious, imo.

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