a million monkeys typing

D*I*Y Planner Widget Kit 0.3

Posted August 28th, 2005 at 11:08pm

Update : This set, and many more, are now available free at www.DIYPlanner.com.

The most requested item on my D*I*Y Planner to-do list, even more so than the Hipster PDA Edition, has been a source file so that people can create their own templates. I’m not about to release my mass of Adobe Illustrator and InDesign files (indeed, they are guaranteed to frighten small children and reduce husky men to tears), but I’ve been hinting for a while at an OpenOffice.org template that mere mortals might use without fear of drowning in thousands of vector layers. The time has come for a preview release.

Below you’ll find an early release of my OpenOffice.org Draw template kit for creating your very own forms, called –ahem– the D*I*Y Planner Widget Kit 0.3. It requires at least 1.1.3 of OpenOffice.org (free at OpenOffice.org), a touch of patience, and a little bit of knowledge of Draw (or at least a willingness to learn it). It should work fine in OOo 1.9.x, but my Linux box is down for the count, so I can’t test it at the moment. (This kit was created with NeoOffice/J on a Mac, a Java-driven version of 1.1.x.) In the package, you’ll find the Draw SXD file, a sample PDF exported from it, and the very necessary Blue Highway fonts. Please make sure you install these first!

When you open up this file, you’ll see a page with a layout that approximates a standard 5.5×8.5 D*I*Y Planner form, and there are a number of graphical elements that you can copy and paste into your own creation. That’s all there is, really: no elite programming or technical skills required, just OOo and enough time to do what you need. My only tip for you: create a new “slide” (i.e., page), copy the whole widget slide into it, delete what you don’t want, and move around the rest, duplicating as necessary. Be sure to plan out your template first (I do mine on paper), and then start experimenting with the kit. The more you use the elements and the application, the more you’ll figure out what’s going on. Sorry, but I’m offering no support for this kit at the moment, nor am I giving any advice on using OOo — that’s what its help is for, and there are tutorials floating around the Net. So use this package at your peril.

Now, here’s the clincher. The new DIYPlanner.com site is going to launch on this Saturday, but we’d like to let a few template designers into the hidden development site a bit early so that they can upload their templates into our directory for sharing. So if you already have templates that you’d like to share, or if you create one using this kit, please email me (the address is at the bottom of the menu at right) and I’ll let you in. Just don’t mind the wet paint and sawdust, and be sure to keep the address top secret! (There are certain things the public shouldn’t see, not yet….)

Download: D*I*Y Planner Widget Kit 0.3

This package is released under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike License.