Am I asking too much of iCal?

August 28, 2005 6:24 PM

[OSX FILTER] I want to print on index cards, but indirectly. Help me figure out how to print to a PDF sized at 3"x5".

Okay, so I've decided to follow the crowd (or at least a segment of the crowd) and start using a variation of the Hipster PDA. I want to print out my daily, weekly, and monthly calendars from iCal onto 3x5 index cards. I'd like to use OSX's "save as PDF" function to print the files as PDFs, then take them to work where I can print them to my heart's content for free. The problem is, when I try to print them, the month header and the little colour-coded guide to the different calendar types take up most of the card, and the actual meat of the information, the calendar itself, is all crammed into a space the height of a centimeter, and is run-together and worthless.

Currently, I'm creating a custom paper size of 3"x5" in Page Setup, turning off the "Print To-Do Lists" and "Print Mini-Months" options in the Print Dialog under "iCal", and then saving them as PDF. I'm running OSX 10.3.9, and iCal 1.5.5.

Is there any hope of getting iCal to print nice, clean calendars (monthly, weekly, and daily) onto 3x5 index cards, or am I SOL with iCal and need to migrate to some other program? I was so hoping this would be easy...

posted by NewGear to technology (3 comments total)

I'd try the 43 Folders Google Group for this. A few months(?) back there was a lot of noise about printing out index cards.
posted by alan at 7:03 PM on August 28, 2005

Well, running Mac OS X 10.4.2 and iCal 2.0.2 you can turn off the "Calendar Keys" as well, and get a pretty clean layout (here's a sample page I just saved). But, there's no longer a "Page Setup" option, only a "Paper" selector, and though it has "Index card 5 x 8 in" it doesn't have 3 x 5. Could you just save to PDFs in some larger size and scale the PDFs down when you print them?
posted by nicwolff at 7:10 PM on August 28, 2005

Boucning off nicwolff's idea, try making a custom page size of 6x10 and then printing at 50% to your cards.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:48 PM on August 28, 2005