Guest Post - Using Filofax Organisers as ring binders - Part 2

Thank you again to Kevin, this is Part 2 of his guest post. 

The scripting for my expedition manual got me thinking about creating inserts, even though I don't use an organiser as a diary or planner. I have recently adapted the expedition AWK scripts to take the output of the Unix 'cal' command (that will print a text calendar) to create week-on-one-page and week-on-two-page annual diaries, using my own format. 

The next step would be to automatically add events, from an external file (e.g. public holidays, saints' days & other significant events, or birthday & anniversaries), and add those to the diary pages. I've added a function to print them, but automatically inserting them into the relevant week pages still needs a bit of thought. I now see that Filofax introduced such a system last year...

Week on one page, PocketA

Week on two pages, PocketA

Week on two pages, alternative Personal (n.b. from the imposed stack)

Week on one page, printed & punched to try

The little five-week calendar in the header might be worth mention; unlike most diaries, that simply print this month's calendar, I have created a table of five weeks, centred around the current week. 

I've since realised it is silly to replicate this on odd and even pages, so I have modified the generator to show the prior four weeks on the left, and the following four weeks on the right.

I've also modified the automatic generation system to create a generic table insert; a simple definition file sets the margins, table title text, font & size, number of columns, their relative sizes, column heading text & fonts, number of rows, grey/colour fill patterns, line thickness & style, watermark or logo insertion (my examples have a very faint watermark in the background) etc. and the script generates the PostScript automatically, sized to whatever page size you want. 

The imposition scripts then prepare inserts for easy printing, trimming & cropping.

A more recent script allows the creation of multiple area tables, each area with row and column size and position definitions, including the ability to create a sub-table within an area of a larger table, or to insert a bujo grid into a table area. 

Areas can overlap, abit, or be layered. It also allows EPS and JPEG images to be scaled and inserted into an area. Table cells can be filled (foreground or background) with any PostScript colour or greyscale, either individually, or in blocks of cells.

Example created table, with inserted EPS, bujo grid, and horrible colours...

Having created these tools, I have discovered the work of Steve & Ray... I've only ever used Excel and Word to generate spreadsheets and typeset documents, not graphics. 

I admire their ability to bend a tool to their will, to produce inserts, but I've always had to fight to get Word and Excel to produce what I want, whereas PostScript is a language designed from the ground up to make marks on paper, in a mathematically precise manner. 

It does my exact and precise bidding, when it comes to drawing lines, filling areas with colour, and placing text of specific font, size & position, provided I'm not typesetting entire pages of text. Command-line Unix is a bit old skool, too, but it is easily accessible via Linux, Cygwin, or even the BSD underpinning MacOS. And the host of Unix productivity tools include little utilities like 'cal' that generate a calendar, without having to fight with Excel coding. 

We use the tools we are familiar with. I'm no graphic designer, but I can get PostScript to produce whatever layout I can think of; it's just the imagination and aesthetic flair that's lacking...

Playing with inserts got me looking through old catalogues at the range of specialist inserts that used to be available, which is quite fascinating. 

The old catalogues also revealed the identity of my 4-ring Pockets. And showed how little had changed between 1937 and 1979; the part numbers are the same, and the picture of the Duplex organiser is identical! 

The anachronism is also spectacular: "It is specially designed for all who require valuable notes ready for easy and immediate reference, including engineers, chemists, students, and all business and professional men". How things have changed...

https://philofaxy.blogspot.com/2023/03/men-and-planners.html

The 'Free-Form Time Management' insert images also interested me somewhat,  I wasted an hour reproducing the logo in PostScript. 

Then wasted a couple more days, faithfully re-creating the entire document and Keypoints inserts in LibreOffice Writer, including downloading the required Bodoni MT and NewCenurySchoolbook fonts. 

Faithfully to the level of replicating line hyphenation, and the notice forbidding reproduction in any form... I created an edited copy, to correct the lack of commas, and some spelling. 

Sadly, LibreOffice will only print to PDF or EPUB, and its Print-to-File only generates machine readable PostScript, that cannot be manipulated by my imposition scripts; it resists my attempts to rotate and shift. 

I also used my table-generating script to recreate all the 'Free-Form' tables within a few hours (though they are simple, and only need a single table area), and these can then be processed by the imposition scripts to impose onto A4 sheets for double-sided printing and easy collation into documents. I have a complete set of printable Free-Form inserts (complete with archaisms like telex and fax cells for contacts)...

If anyone is interested in a (free) copy of the composition & imposition scripts, let me know; they run under Linux (or Cygwin under Windows), and are command-line based, but fairly straightforward, and the content files can be created in any text editor. 

The scripts are available here, they are contained in a zip file that has a read-me file with the details of each file in the zip. Thank you to Kevin for agreeing to let us have a copy of his scripts which remain his copyright but for free non-commercial use by others. 

Thank you Kevin. I'm sure people might have questions about your inserts. Please leave a comment below.