How to Print PostScript Calendars from Linux Console

There are so many command line tools for printing calendars and calculating dates, weekdays, lunar cycles, easter dates and lot more that it is difficult to remember all the possibilities these tools have to offer. I suppose everyone knows that the commad date prints the current time and date, and some probably most of my readers know how to print the calendar of current month using cal, gcal or ccal.

These tools are capable of lot more than simply outputting the current calendar to the standard output. Just see info gcal and you certainly will learn a lot more about gcal you can remember! I wanted, however, simply get a postscript or pdf calendar to be able to print it and have it on my wall. It took me some time before I realized, that gcal was not, after all, the right tool for the job.



What I needed was pcal. Simple command pcal > calendar.ps did exactly what I wanted: it produced a file with postscript code needed for printing this month's calendar. pcal is of course capable of doing a lot more, man pcal for more information.