jmtd → log → hyperlinked PDF planner

The Year page

A day page

I've been having reasonable success with time blocking, a technique I learned from Cal Newport's writings, in particular Deep Work. I'd been doing it on paper for a while, but I wanted to try and move to a digital solution.

There's a cottage industry of people making (and selling) various types of diary and planner as PDF files for use on tablets such as the Remarkable. Some of these use PDF hyperlinks to greatly improve navigating around. This one from Clou Media is particularly good, but I found that I wanted something slightly different from what I could find out there, so I decided to build my own.

I explored a couple of different approaches for how to do this. One was Latex, and here's one example of a latex-based planner, but I decided against as I spend too much time wrestling with it for my PhD work already.

Another approach might have been Pandoc, but as far as I could tell its PDF pipeline went via Latex, so I thought I might as well cut out the middleman.

Eventually I stumbled across tools to build PDFs from HTML, via "CSS Paged Media". This appealed, because I've done plenty of HTML generation. print-css.rocks is a fantastic resource to explore the print-specific CSS features. Weasyprint is a fantastic open source tool to convert appropriately-written HTML/CSS into PDF.

Finally I wanted to use a templating system to take shortcuts on writing HTML. I settled for embedded Ruby, which is something I haven't touched in over a decade. This was a relatively simple project and I found it surprisingly fun.

The results are available on GitHub: https://github.com/jmtd/planner. Right now, you get exactly what I have described. But my next plan is to add support for re-generating a planner, incorporating new information: pulling diary info from iCal, and any annotations made (such as with the Remarkable tablet) on top of the last generation and preserving them on the next.