30 April 2014

DiY 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!

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. I noticed recently they had come out with an Beta for an updated Mac version of the software, I've downloaded this and it works on the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system.

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. 
  • 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

11 comments:

  1. I've been using this for a couple of years, but hadn't noticed the new Mac beta, I'll definitely try it out. Its brilliant for making your own customised diaries, Ygor has done a great job with it. I found it quite confusing at first, even trying to work out where to download it and how to use it, but it seems better laid out nowadays. Well worth investing some effort in getting to understand i.

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  2. Really nice and useful. Thank you for sharing, Steve.

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  3. Thanks, Steve. I have a Mac, so I'll pootle over and give the site a go.

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  4. I love that site. I've looked around there many times.

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  5. I found that the source code for the DIY Dynamic Template app was uploaded to github: https://github.com/osresearch/DynamicTemplates

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  6. Hello, where can we find this software today? Thank you for your help

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    1. From an earlier comment I believe it is now available here:
      https://github.com/osresearch/DynamicTemplates

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  7. Ok thanks, I don't have the skills to use source codes. I thought it was out-of-the-box software. I'll try to find something else. if you know a software which allows to make planners and to change the format, i am interested. Thank you!

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    1. Our own are fairly easy to 'adjust' and create your own from.

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  8. ok i will study those then, thanks

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