tlug: X ical backend on offer

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

I started using TurboLinux 2.0 a month or two ago, with
Applixware-J.  Glad to have both; life is simpler now.

Looking at the calendar that ships with TurboLinux, I find myself
wondering whether the developer might be interested in tying this
up with the calendar package for LaTeX2e, which I've written.
Like ical, the calendar package can handle recursive dates.  The
package also does some things (like classifying appointments and
events into groups for color-coding) that the ical front-end
doesn't do, but that might provide ideas for further development
of ical...?

The advantage of cooperation between the two would be greatly
enhanced output for ical.  Instead of simple lists, you would get
monthly and yearly calendars, a weekly filofax calendar, an
itinerary/conference planner, a project planner and a few other
odds and ends (like HTML tables and event lists, so that your
Web-announced calendar and your diary have the same content), all
fully configurable for paper size and orientation and et cetera.

You would also get language switchability --- the calendar
package draws on external data files for the date-words, and you
can define a language "stack" for your site, so that a single
event list can have, say, texts in English, Japanese and French
for each item listed, defaulting to (say) English if the
appropriate text is missing.  Then you can crank out (say) a
conference itinerary in the native language of each of the
participants without going nuts trying to keep track of multiple
files.

All in all, you'd get _much_ more configurability in your output
than MS calendar provides.  Stitching the two together to provide
simple calendars would not be all that difficult, I'm sure.

The calendar package is in the CTAN archives under
latex/supported, if anyone wants to take a look.  I've got a
string of more or less minor bug reports that need attending to,
but for normal use it is pretty reliable stuff in its current
form.  If someone adopts it as an output back end to a graphical
calendar, it would give me a much stronger incentive to dig into
the code and clear up the little glitches that have cropped up
over the past year or so.  It _can_ be used without a make-easy
front-end, using simple lists of dates as data files (I keep my
own calendar that way), but most users would, I think, like a
pretty front-end that shields them from the (gasp) latex command
and the (shudder) dvips command.

Anyway, does anyone think such a marriage would be worth the
candle?  If so, can anyone give me contact details for the ical
developer(s) so I can send him or them a note?

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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