Automating Calendar Annotations - an advice
Posted: December 20th, 2010, 12:26 pm
I'm creating a 'serious' Calandar for the first time. While the base calendar creation is largely automated, especially with Kiril's workflow and it's offshoots, the annotation process is not. If the Calendar Transform could accept the list of dates to be coloured/annotated, that would be sweet. For now I'm trying to automate it somehow - here is what I've done, perhaps others could comment how to possibly do it simpler and more efficiently.
1) To colour Sundays and holidays, I went through each month page, masked the numbers that I wanted in red, and used Remap with pretty relaxed radii and tightness to replace black digits with red. It worked, but it's quite a bit of manual work, and one would have to do that for each calendar separately.
2) Annotation with Text by hand is grueling, takes a long time and lacks positioning precision and consistency, so I figured that the Layout may help. After measuring the pixel coordinates of the corner of the Calendar grid, I overlaid a 6x7 grid of panels, made them transparent and and kept cycling through them while entering text. I saved the layout and apply the same technique to each month/calendar page. One tip is not to click on panels, since it's easy to move them inadvertently, rather use Cycle button. Also, there is no Zoom function in Layout - it is sometimes difficult to see how the text looks like before producing the image out Layout.
1) To colour Sundays and holidays, I went through each month page, masked the numbers that I wanted in red, and used Remap with pretty relaxed radii and tightness to replace black digits with red. It worked, but it's quite a bit of manual work, and one would have to do that for each calendar separately.
2) Annotation with Text by hand is grueling, takes a long time and lacks positioning precision and consistency, so I figured that the Layout may help. After measuring the pixel coordinates of the corner of the Calendar grid, I overlaid a 6x7 grid of panels, made them transparent and and kept cycling through them while entering text. I saved the layout and apply the same technique to each month/calendar page. One tip is not to click on panels, since it's easy to move them inadvertently, rather use Cycle button. Also, there is no Zoom function in Layout - it is sometimes difficult to see how the text looks like before producing the image out Layout.