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13 April 2020

DiY Planner Dynamic Templates

The DiY planner website has been around for ages. It is where I first started to share my Filofax Templates, before I knew about Philofaxy even! I last wrote about their Dynamic Templates back in 2014, so I thought it was time for an update.

They have had their Dynamic Templates for years too, these are generated by an application which will run on a Windows PC or a Mac.

The Windows application appears to run ok on Windows 10 (64 bit) so it should be ok on Windows 10 Home edition and earlier versions of Windows, although I only have one Windows 10 machine these days!

The beta Mac version will run on the latest version of OS X 10.15. and earlier Mac versions for Intel processors, such as OS X 10.13 High Sierra. The normal Mac version works ok on my older PowerMac hardware running OS X 10.4 Tiger.  To find out which version of OS you are using click on the Apple symbol in the top left of your screen, then 'About This Mac'

This is the main screen:


From this screen you can edit and select the following:
  • Type of page including, Calendars, note pages etc
  • For Calendars what day of the week you want to start on, and you can choose any of the 7 days in a week
  • The date of the first week, so you can try these out for different weeks as you wish. 
  • The date of the last week, to specify the range of dates
  • Time of the first appointment
  • 12 or 24 hour clock
  • Ruled or Unruled 
  • Layout and there are many to choose from including daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. 
In the Page Size tab you can alter and set:
  • Landscape or Portrait formats
  • Imperial or Metric measurement
  • Paper Type - European (ISO) or US sizes or Custom. Custom can be any size you want to create. 
  • Margins, essential for Filofax layouts to allow for the rings on the inside of the pages 
In the Line Spacing and Thickness tab you can set the line spacing on entries to a selection of different styles and adjust the line thickness used in the templates.

As you change any of the parameters though the results are shown on the screen as you can see above, so you don't have to print it out each time you make an adjustment.

The scale adjustment in the top left hand corner allows you to tailor it to fit your own screen.

To output the final result you can save the template as a pdf file, then you just print your pdf file in the normal way. However take care that your pdf doesn't get rescaled, always print it at 100% other wise your margins will be different.

These pages are great for trying out ideas, or may be just to try a different page size format before you commit to using it full time.

To try this software out for yourself, go to the page on DiY planner

5 comments:

  1. I've never heard of this website, so thanks for sharing it. I need some B6 (or personal wide, even) weeklies so will check it out.

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  2. Thank you for this post, I know this site quite well :) These were my early days, when I started something "new" called time management... It was 2005!!!!

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  3. Something happened to the DIYPlanner web site - tons of content is now gone and it has been condensed into like 5 web pages... What was the last version of the DIY Dynamic Templates app that you know of? Is the source still available somewhere (last I saw was a C++ version for DIY_Dynamic_Templates_V2 with comments by Igor).

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    1. That's a shame. I know Doug the founder of the site was having problems with the site being hacked a lot a few years ago. And eventually he handed over the running of the site to a small team. But I'm not sure what happened in the end.

      I contributed some of my first templates to that site back in about 2007 before I had discovered Philofaxy!

      I can't remember what version of the app I have, I will check on my Power PC G4 Mac!

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  4. A google search for "what happened to diyplanner.com" brought me here.

    For those of you who remember the old website, it can still be accessed via the web archive. Here's a link to the post which includes the program to make your calendar. https://web.archive.org/web/20200128173813/https://www.diyplanner.com/node/6210
    I was able to download the windows program with no problem.

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