calendar printing revisited

[Elizabeth Barham <lizzy@soggytrousers.net>]

Hi,

   Some time ago, someone was enquiring about software that will make
a pretty calendar complete with certain events. I forget the ultimate
outcome of that exchange, but in case anyone is still interested,
there is the 'pcal' program:

Package: pcal
Priority: optional
Section: utils
Installed-Size: 268
Maintainer: Camm Maguire <camm@enhanced.com>
Architecture: powerpc
Version: 4.7-8
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), libpaperg
Filename: pool/main/p/pcal/pcal_4.7-8_powerpc.deb
Size: 116310
MD5sum: 21003c80aa1efb6bb3be14d2426b9206
Description: Makes printable Postscript calendars without X.
 "Pcal" is a program to print PostScript calendars for any month and year.
 By default, it looks for a file in the home directory named "calendar"
 for entries with leading dates matching dates on the calendar, and prints
 any following text under the appropriate day.

   I printed out one of its calendars and it looks fantastic but there
is only one (small) set back preventing this application being used
with gnomecal and evolution: the format of the data file that houses
the calendar events is very different. From pcal(1):

       Dates in the .calendar file may be expressed in any of
       several formats:

            <ordinal> <day_spec> in <month_spec>{*} {<text>}
            {<ordinal>} <day_spec> <prep> <date_spec>{*} {<text>}
            <date_spec>{*} {<text>}
            <holiday>

   Evolution and gnomecal, however, use the iCalendar format and now
with libical[1], a fairly small translation of pcal's native parser to
use libical and convert the iCalendar events to something pcal can
work with seems rather easy and straight-forward.

   Evolution, btw, is able to generate a mean looking postscript
calendar all ready, so perhaps the above-mentioned modification is not
called for but perhaps someone will find this newsworthy.

   Elizabeth

[1] <http://softwarestudio.org/libical/>