There's a file named 2006.pdf that has been in my
~/TODO directory for so long that I've forgotten where I found
it. It's a very nice calendar: one line per month, with the (dates
shifted left or right so as to have the) weekends vertically aligned,
and coloured red. I thought it was useful, clever, and attractive.
The PDF meta-data says it was created by "Brad", and a faint memory
tells me that his site had many other interesting examples of design,
both visual and electronic, but I have not been able to find it again.
Here's a copy of the file.
The file was in my TODO directory because I wanted to write a program to
print a similar calendar for a given year; and this I have now done.
wcal
produces cal(1)-style output on the console, using
ANSI escape sequences
to colour the weekends red (and the current date green).
One problem with this calendar is that it breaks up weekends that span
month boundaries. If January 31 is a Saturday, both it and the first of
February become red stragglers at the edge of the calendar, even though
they constitute a perfectly ordinary weekend in practice.
I wrote wcal-compact to address this.
Instead of giving each month its own line of dates, this program takes
all 365 days of the year, colours the weekends red, and splits them up
into lines such that all full weekends are vertically aligned.
That left one special case I could do nothing about: if the first of
January is a Sunday (as it was in 2006), it becomes a straggler.
Since the compact output makes the months run together, I changed the
background colour of every alternate month to white (and most of the
added complexity in the new program deals with the proper resetting
of the background colour on continued lines), but I'm not especially
fond of this hack.
I haven't been able to make up my mind about which form of
weekend-aligned calendar is more useful.