Holidays

Introduction

The calendarWizard has the ability to pull multiple lists of dates and text from the current text frame, a file anywhere on the computer, or from text files in a
pre-defined directory and place them into the appropriate cell. When active, the holiday layer will be created.

If two holidays are listed for the same date, they will both be printed in the cell seperated by a new line. If the text of a holiday exactly appears in two of more lists, only the first occurance will be printed. Note text of the holidays must be exact. Any differences in spelling, capitalization, or extra space will cause the script to consider them different and print both.

Holiday List Format:

The format of a holiday is either: mm-dd-yyyy:text or mm-dd:text

Note, the script does not use leading 0's, so use 1-1 for January 1st rather than 01-01. The text could be anything. For example:

1-1:New Year's Day
1-19-2009:Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday

For holidays which occur on the same date every year, such as new year's day or somebody's birthday, it's best to use the format "mm-dd". When the holiday changes from year to year, such as Easter, use "mm-dd-yyyy".

The longer the holiday list is, the longer it will take to generate a calender regardless if the holidays occur in that month or not.

Selecting a Holiday List and Style

When selecting a holiday list there are four styles: A, B, C, and D. Checking any of the sytles will trigger the script to use that holiday list. The particular style is simply there to allow the user to differentiate between different types of holidays (for example Christian Holidays and birthdays) The first style in alphabetical order is the one that will be used if multiple styles are selected.

Loading from the Current Frame

The list of holidays can be typed into a text frame. If the frame is selected and a style for the "From Current Frame" is selected, the script will load and print the holidays from that frame.

Note, when selected, the behavior of "Auto" for the page setting changes. In this case a new document will be created so the date information is not destroyed. If you want to replace the holiday text with the calendar, set Page to "Current Text Frame".

Loading from a Custom File

If selected, the script will bring up a dialog box in which one or more files may be selected. They are expected to be simple text files (not MS Word documents) that adhere to the holiday list format described above. Notepad or some other simple text editor is a good tool to use for generating the text files rather than a Word Processor like MS Word. If you do use Word or OpenOffice, be sure to save the file as a simple text file (.txt)

Loading from Pre-Defined Files

In InDesign version above CS2, when the script runs, it will look for a folder called "holidays" next to the script itself. In CS1 and CS2, the folder must be at "<InDesign Install Folder>/Presets/Scripts/calendarWizard". On the calendarWizard interface, a set of checkboxes will be created for every file that ends in ".holidays" inside that folder. The files are expected to conform to the holiday list specification.

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