Printing a Calendar, Including a Big One on a Single Page
You can use your web browser to print out your calendar. If you have set your calendar's width to Fill Browser Window (using the /Administer/General Settings menu), it will print out to the size of the paper you are using, automatically (unless the week or month you are printing has a gigantic amount of text). Or you can use that menu to specify the overall width of your calendar in pixels, so you can print the full calendar correctly in either portrait or landscape mode. A good width for printing a calendar in portrait orientation is 700 pixels; for landscape, use 920 pixels.
Calendars printed with black-on-white printers look best with high contrast font and background colors, such as black on white or the reverse. You will find that laser printers will print some color combinations as gray on gray, which cannot be read.
Print a Monthly Calendar with Lots of Events on One Page
If you have a lot of events on a calendar, the printout will take more than one page. We know of 5 ways to avoid this:
The best way is to use Mozilla or Firefox as your browser. You can obtain either of them free at http://www.mozilla.org. We prefer Firefox, as it is purely a browser and does not have the email client built it. For email, we use Thunderbird. Firefox and Thunderbird, both built on Mozilla, appear to be adding new features much quicker than the Mozilla combination package.
When viewing your calendar in either Mozilla or Firefox, select from the menu File, Print Preview (or Alt-F, V). Or install the "Print Preview" extensions available at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=314 or https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=282, which create a Print Preview button on the Firefox toolbar (which you access by right-clicking on the toolbar and choosing customize).
Once the print preview view comes up, you can scale the size of the page up or down dramatically and then print out the re-scaled page. This is by far the best way to print out a huge month on one page.
Another way is to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or above. Strangely, if you click on View, Text Size, and change it to smaller or smallest, the calendar shrinks for printing purposes also. This is the easiest way to make your big calendar print on one page, but sometimes you cannot shrink it enough with this method.
Another way is to change the settings on your printer to shrink-to-fit. Some printers have "shrink-to-fit" options buried somewhere inside "Properties" or "Options" or "Layout" or "Setup". Set those options to print the web page on a single sheet. How to do this varies with each type of printer.
Another way is to use Microsoft Word 2000 or later. Go to the calendar month or week you want to print in your browser. Save the file with an .htm extension. Load that file into Microsoft Word 2000. Use the File/Print Preview menu choice (Alt-F,V). Click on the Shrink to Fit icon in the Print Preview toolbar (it shows two pages and an arrow pointing to one page; it is the second icon to the left of Close). Then click on the print icon. This will print your calendar onto a single page, unless it is so huge that MS Word and your printer cannot handle the fonts. Note: Earlier versions of Microsoft Word cannot read the complex HTML files that iCal generates.
Here is a dorky way to to use Microsoft Word 2000 to print big calendars on a single page: Hit Ctrl-P to print the page. Then choose more than one "Pages per sheet" in the Zoom headings in the bottom right of the menu. This will print more than one page per sheet but will likely break your calendar in the middle of a month.
Another way is to use Fineprint by Single Track Software. Fineprint enables any Windows program to print in a variety of special formats (such as 4 pages per sheet, etc) and will shrink very large pages into letter-size printouts. The registered version is $40; there is a free version that works fine but limits any printing job to 8 pages (not a problem here) and puts a small identifier for Single Track Software at the bottom of each page printed.
To print a large calendar on one page:
- Download FinePrint from FinePrint Software and install it.
- Use your browser to go to the calendar month you want to print.
- Go to the /administer/general settings menu to change the width of the calendar,
if you want. The default width is "Fill Browser Window," and that should
work fine.
- If you want to set a specific pixel width for a Portrait page, change the width to 930 pixels.
- If you want to set a pixel width for a Landscape page, change the width to 1440 pixels.
- Remember, you don't have to set a pixel width at all if you use the "Fill Browser Window" setting.
- Use your browser to print the page and select FinePrint as your printer. You will then see a Properties button to the right. Use that to button to select "Ledger 11x17" as the paper size and to select either Portrait or Landscape mode, as you wish. Save your changes to the properties. Hit OK to print the page.
- When the FinePrint screen appears, you will see a mini-preview of your printout. Set Layout to 1 up, Borders to off, and Margins to none. If you are printing on a black/white printer but have colored text in your calendar, you might want to hit Options and set colored text to black or to the color correction setting, both of which will darken text that might otherwise be too light gray to read.
- Then hit OK to print.
The result should be one calendar month on one page, even if the month has many events. Here is a related FinePrint Tutorial on shrinking to fit.
Other Ways to Print
You can also print your calendar using the Administer/Publish Calendar function. This will create HTML pages for the range of months you specify. You can then navigate to these HTML files (the program goes to the first one created; which correctly hyperlinks to the others) and print out each month from your browser. These printouts are the same as those directly from your active calendar but do not show the various menu bars that otherwise appear along the bottom of each month (although you can eliminate those menu bars anyway in the /Administer/General Setting menu).
Some users generate these linked static HTML pages and post them on their own web servers, which keeps the traffic local and eliminates any delay from users accessing the Calendars Net servers. Perhaps the best way to use this feature is in combination with Offline Calendar Editing (see next section). You can download your calendar's data file and use iCal on your own computer to read your calendar and to generate locally the static HTML files you can then access and post to your own web site.
Posting Static Calendar Pages on your Web Site ("Publish Calendar")
Although we do not recommend this, you can generate static calendar pages and post them on your web site, instead of linking to your interactive calendar. Anytime you change your calendar, however, you will have to generate and save the static pages again. In any event, here is how it works:
Click on Administer this Calendar (usually at the bottom of your calendar). Go to Publish Calendar, select the span of months you want, and hit Create. That will produce static HTML pages and will display to you a page with a link to a static version of the first static month. Click on that link, and the first static month will display. Do not save that HTML file to your own computer with your browser. Instead, browse to the next month in the series. Then use your browser's "Save As" function to save that HTML page to a particular subdirectory. Then click on the link for the next month you want to save, and save that file in the same way. Repeat this process until you have saved each static month that you want, except the first month. Then click on the link to the first month and "Save As" that page in the same manner.
The reason to do the first month last is that will assign the correct filename to the first month. Otherwise, it will have a name (like curblockmonth.html) that will not link correctly from the other pages in the series. In other words, every page will automatically save with the correct filename, except the beginning month for the static range. But you can automatically save that one with the correct name by going to a different month in the static range and then back to the beginning month. Then save that page.
Put a link on your web page to the static version of the first month, and all of the months will correctly inter-link on your own system.
When you save them, make sure you save them as web pages (.htm or .html) and not just straight text.
Offline Calendar Editing
You can now download your calendar data file from Calendars Net, edit it offline with ical or with an ASCII text editor, and upload it back to Calendars Net. This enables you to edit your calendar faster, with no waits for the Calendars Net servers to respond to every edit. If you use an ASCII text editor, you must be very careful and sure that you understand the structure of the data file. Better choice is to use the free version of iCal running on your own computer. Here are the 3 steps. And here are handy links, if you already know the steps:
Calendars Net |
Offline Editing |
File Upload |
File Download |
These links are found on the bottom of several pages.
Eliminating the Calendars Net "Credits" from Footers
At the bottom of each calendar (in a footer) are one or two small graphics. One identifies and links to Calendars Net; the other links to Brownbear Software, which produces the program (iCal) that runs the calendars. We may also display logos for other products that work well with Calendars Net. If you want to eliminate this footer so that your calendar appears completely internal to your site, please go to the Calendars Net Order Form and choose the Calendars Net Ad-Free Calendar. Be sure to include your calendar's file name in the box. Your calendar will be moved to the ads-free server within 24 hours. The address for your calendar will stay the same.
Another way for Users to Subscribe to a Calendar and Get Updates by Email
A less efficient way for users to get automatic notification when your calendar changes is by using a free web page change monitoring services, such as Tracerlock. The user registers with Tracerlock and sets up notification for the calendar's URL, such as: my.calendars.net/mydates. Tracerlock appears to generate change notices and email them out once per day.
There are similar fee-based services, such as Mind It.
Each of these services can only track changes to events in the current month only and their emails seem to go out on an unpredictable schedule. The advantage of these systems, over using the Calendars Net Email Notification System, is that a user can subscribe to the calendar with no need for the calendar administrator to do anything. Then again, these systems do not provide the calendar administrator with a list of their subscribers, either.
Note that a user who establishes notification for a Calendars Net URL at Tracerlock or Mind It will automatically receive a notice of change on the first of every month, whether or not the calendar has actually changed. The default display page of the calendar will automatically shift to the current month, which the monitoring services will see as a "change."
Subscribe to this Setup Page
We add to this Setup page at least once a week, as we add features to Calendars Net or as users tell us new ways to use the system. If you want to know when the Setup page changes, subscribe to it via one of the free web page change monitoring services, such as Tracerlock.
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