I have not had a chance to make complete documentation for Desktop Calendar Maker yet, but hopefully this quick start guide will get you started.
Basically, there are four steps:
As well as your digital images, you will need one or more CD calendar cases a color printer, some good quality glossy photo paper and a way to neatly slice the calendars (eg a rotary trimmer).
Each step has a pane in the main window.
Click the + button or drag in a photo to the main section. You can give the photo a name (which is for your purposes) and a title/title color which will be displayed on the photo. Create two cropped areas, one appears at the top of the calendar page, the other appears on the side. I like to choose a little part of the photo for the side image (eg a single flower, or someone’s ear/eye/hand or some other thing like that. You can see an example preview of the final calendar page. You’ll want at least twelve images configured, although you can use less if you don’t mind repeating the images on multiple calendar pages.
Configure any text that will be attached to the calendar months (eg Christmas). The meaning of the local flag is to allow you to have an optional set of text for some calendars and not others. For example, I usually include school terms, but that is useless for my UK friends that I send the calendars to, so I mark those elements of text as "Local" and don’t include them on their calendars.
Now you can create calendars. Click the + button to add a new calendar. Select the year, and for each month, select one of your pictures. You can see previews of all the 12 months. Select whether to include the Local text or not.
Click the build button to build the images. The resulting A4 pages each contain two calendars with cutting lines marked so you can easily slice them. They are designed to be printed at 100% scale and are 300dpi. Depending on your printer, you might need to adjust the scale slightly to ensure the resulting calendar is 5.4" x 4.65" (136 x 116 mm).
I recommend using good quality branded paper at about 180g/m2. I have found cheaper paper tends to curly by the end of the year, and thicker paper may become difficult to slice.
Don’t skimp on cheap photo paper, it tends to curl over a year. I usually aim for around 180g/m2 glossy photo paper - thicker is fine, except that it can become difficult to slice, and slicing the images is the most tedious part of making the calendars.
