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Add a Calendar to Wallpaper Click image for larger view |
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| Download some files. I have created two different types of calendar templates. Download Calendars 1 or Calendars 2. These files are memory intensive, they have a lot of data in vector layers and will take a few seconds to open. There are seven templates in each zip, each begins on a different day of the week. You will need some desktop wallpaper. You can make your own, download one of mine, or find your own on the web. National Geographic has some beautiful images available as wallpaper. You will also need Gary Barton's most excellent Text Change Attributes script if you want text other than Arial. The script needs to be extracted to your Scripts-Restricted folder. |
See a sample of the calendar files. | |
| Open images. Open your wallpaper image. Open the calendar file that begins on the correct day of the week for the month you want. For example, to make a calendar for November 2003, open the Saturday file. |
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Modify the calendar image. You will see that each calendar in the zip has 31 days. If you happen to be doing a month with 31 days, you need not modify the dates. For months less than 31 days, you will need to delete the "extra" days. In the layer control palette, click on the plus sign next to the "arrange dates here" layer to expand the layer, showing all of the sub-layers. Right click on the sub-layer with the date(s) that you want to get rid of and choose Clear. In the Calendars 2 files, you will also need to remove the extra grid lines. This is easier to do if you first click on the  Object Selector tool so that the lines are highlighted with a bounding box. Use the ojbect selector tool again to select the top and bottom lines and drag to shorten them. |
See a screen capture of this step. |
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Change the font if desired. The vector files are created with Arial since virtually all Windows users are assured of having this font installed. It's not a very fun font though. If you would like to change the font to something else, we will save ourselves a lot of time by using Gary Barton's Text Change Attributes script. Click on the  Text tool. Set your background swatch to the color you want the text to be and the foreground swatch to null. Set the font attributes, here I've used Bolton 11 point. You can change any or all of the text. To change all of it, Select-> Select None. To change just part of the text, select those in the vector sub-layers. For example, if you wanted to leave the numbers as Arial and just change the days at the top, you would open the "days" vector sub-layer and shift + click to select each day. Find the Text Change Attributes script in the Script drop down and hit the  Run Script button. This script takes a little time to run but is much easier than having to change each sub-layer individually. |
See a screen capture of this step. |
| Optional stuff. You can further personalize your calendars. If you have special dates that you need help to remember, you can change the properties of individual text characters. For example, if there were a birthday that you didn't want to forget on the sixth of the month, you might want to make the six a different color. To do this, click on the Text tool, double-click on the vector sub-layer under the "arrange dates here" layer and change the background swatch color to something bright. Or, you could add a new vector layer and use the Shape tool to draw a circle around a date. Or, you could add a new vector layer, use the Shape tool and draw a new shape in a bright color underneath the text. |
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Fix any character that got bumped out of alignment. Some fonts will cause the characters to move out of alignment. There are guides included with the image files. To show them, right click on the image title bar and choose Guides. Use the Object Selector tool to move any out of place characters. |
See a screen capture of this step. |
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Add the calendar to your wallpaper. Select-> Select None. Click on the Object Selector tool. Starting at the top left of the calendar image, drag down to the bottom right to select all of the vector data. Edit-> Copy. Bring up your wallpaper image. Edit-> Paste as New Vector Selection. This may take a few moments to process, as I said before, there's a lot of vector data here. The calendar will paste with the white backscreen at 100% opacity. Don't worry about this just now, first get the calendar exactly where you want it in the image by dragging it around. |
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Adjust the backscreen to taste. The calendar files include a "backscreen" layer. This is provided for images that need some partially opaque background for the calendar text to show up. You can delete this, change the color or adjust the opacity on it to suit your particular image. In the layer control palette expand the Vector 1 layer to show the sub-layers. At the very bottom of the stack will be a layer called "Rectangle". This is the backscreen. If you want to delete it, right click on it and choose Clear. Otherwise, we'll add a new vector layer so that we can manipulate this further. Compress the Vector 1 sub-layers back down by clicking on the minus sign. Layers-> New Vector Layer. Drag this layer so that it is below the Vector 1 layer and above your raster (wallpaper) layer. Expand the Vector 1 sub-layers again, click on the Rectangle sub-layer and drag it to the Vector 2 layer. You can now lower the opacity of this layer by dragging the Opacity slider down. If you want to change the color of it, double click on the sub-layer and edit the properties to your taste. |
See a screen capture of this step. |
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Add the month to your image. Click on the Vector 1 layer, Layers-> New Vector Layer. Click on the text tool and choose your text options. Click on the image and type in the name of the month. |
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| Save the image. To use the image as wallpaper save it to your Windows directory as a .bmp. Go to your desktop, right click, choose Properties. Click on the Background tab, Browse button, find the new file and OK. |
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