Advanced Event Formats

Each event is on a single line, comprised of the following components:

day mon [year] [lead_time] text

The first component is either the day of the month or the day of the week, followed by the month. This is followed optionally by a year, and an optional lead time, and finally by the text of the event.

Day of the Month

For the day of the month, it can be either:

• A positive number between 1 and the number of days in the month, indicating the day of the month on which the event occurs.

• A negative number to count back from the end of the month, -1 being the last day of the month, -2 the second last day and so on.

Day of the Week

For the day of the week, it will be one of Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat or Sun to indicate the day of the week, followed by either a positive or negative number to indicate which week in the month in which the event occurs.

Examples:

It is important that there be no spaces between the day name and the number following it.

If you specify the fifth day of the week in a month, such as the fifth Monday of the month, and the month only contains four Mondays in the current year, the event will not be displayed for that year.

Month

The month is one of Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov or Dec, indicating which calendar month the event occurs.

It is possible to have an event that occurs in more than one month, either by specifying a range, or as discreet list. For example:

Fri-1 Mar,Jun,Sep,Dec Prepare quarterly reports

1 Jan-Jun This is the first half of the year

Mon Jan-Mar,Aug The odd event

Again, no spaces should be between the months, only commas or hyphens.

Year

If a year is specified, then the number of years between the current year and the year of the event is displayed in parenthesis.

Example: For the event:

1 Apr 1980 John's birthday

In the year 2009, it would be displayed with a “29” in parenthesis:

If you wanted an event that only occurred in a specific year, put a “+1” after the year (no spaces). For example:

27 Dec 2009+1 Public holiday for Christmas

If you wanted an event to only occur for two years in a row, you could put a “+2”, a “+3” for three years, and so on.

Lead Time

By default, events are displayed from five days before they occur. You can change this for a specific event by specifying the number of days warning after the year. For example, if you had “1 Apr 1980 10 John's birthday” then on the 25th of March you would see:

If you want to use a default lead time other than five days, you can change it by putting the following in the event file:

lead time n

Where “n” is the number of days lead time you want by default. All events specified after this line will have the new lead time by default.

Event Text

This is simply the text to be displayed for the event. It can pretty much be anything, although it is probably a good idea to avoid starting the event text with a number or it could get misinterpreted as a year or the desired lead time.