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Menstruation calendar
Mencal is a simple variation of the well-known unix command cal. The main difference is that you can have some periodically repeating days highlighted in color. This can be used to track menstruation (or other) cycles conveniently.
Requirements
This program is written in the perl language. It also uses the unix locales and the system commands strftime and mktime.
I don't know which systems have all those,
but at least any linux distribution should provide you with everything necessary for running mencal.
License
The software may be freely distributed under the terms of the GPL.
You can read the license here.
Download
You can download the complete tarball via HTTP right here.
mencal-2.3.tar.gz
size: 19169 bytes
MD5: e0fa5665b8f7772521bb95379bfdec20
Installation
First: unpack the archive
$ tar xzf mencal-2.3.tar.gz
Now enter the directory mencal-2.3 that was created.
$ cd mencal-2.3
And that's about all. This directory also contains a tiny README file,
a copy of the license and the most important file mencal.
You can run this program even as an unprivileged user with the command
./mencal. You can copy the file to wherever it's convenient for you and run it from there.
Running mencal
You run the program like this:
$ mencal [options] [file1 file2 ... -c CONF1 -c CONF2 ... ]
Display options:
- -m or --monday - take monday as the first day of the week
(sunday is the default)
- -1 - print the current month (default)
- -3 - print the previous, current and next month
- -y [yyyy] - print a calendar for the whole year yyyy.
If the year is not given, the current year is used.
- -q or --quiet - don't print the introduction
- -n or --nocolor - don't use color in the output
- -i COLOR or --icolor COLOR - intersection color
(the default is red, other possible are green, blue, yellow, violet,
cyan, shiny (intense white) and bold (not really a color))
Menstruation options:
-c or --config s=[YYYY]MMDD,l=DD,d=T,n=NAME,f=FILE,c=COLOR
The second argument is a comma separated list of options. No spaces are
allowed in this list. If no name is specified, 'Unknown' is used.
Various -c options or filenames can be set.
- s,start=[YYYY]MMDD - začátek cyklu (standardně aktuální den)
- l,length=DD - length of period in days (default 28)
- d,duration=T - duration of menstruation in days (default 4)
- n,name=NAME - name of subject
- f,file=FILE - filename to save configuration to
(only menstruation related variables will be saved)
- c,color=COLOR - color used for menstruation days of subject
(available colors are the same as with --icolor,
the switch -n will cause this color setting to be ignored)
Informational options:
- -h or --help - prints help on options
- -V or --version - prints version information
Examples
- Example 1 - a simple example of three current months
- Example 2 - an example of a full setting of a particular mentruation cycle in an unusual yellow color
- Example 3 - a calendar for a whole year for two persons, the settings for one are taken from the file maruskarc,
the days, when both persons are menstruating, are marked red
- Example 4 -
the same settings as example 3, no colors (suitable for printing or for some monochrome terminals), without the starting info
- Example 5 a Example 6
- a bit over-done ...
Known bugs
Incorrect day names displaying
In some cases of special locales setings the day names are displayed incorrectly.
For example if one uses hu_HU, some day names have only one character, which
can cause table damage. Thank to Peter Gervai for bug info.
Solved: upgrade to version 2.3.
Error message typo
Micah Anderson wrote about a typo in one of error messages you can see
after bad parameter settings.
Solved: upgrade to version 2.2.
The 'more' command
The only real problem occurs when you are using the command more on
the colored output, e.g. $ mencal -y -c c=red | more ... it all gets
messed up
Solved: use more -f or less -R.
Thanks to Peter K. Gale for this hint.
The year must be greater than 1900
Regrettably you can't use years below 1900. The cause is that perl
works with years decremented by 1900. So if you use the year 2002, perl
has to convert it to 102. And it of course refuses to use negative numbers. If you have any ideas how to work around this, please tell me.
Localisation
The names of days and months are taken from locales, so it would probably be nice to localize the help and program messages.
There are not that many messages, in fact. Well, next time. ;-)
Color printing
I have some messages, that it is impossible to print the colored output on
a printer ($ mencal | lpr), that the output on the paper looks really bad.
It's possible. I'm sorry, but I don't have any printer to look at it and take
care about. Use the -n switch for non-colored output.
$ mencal -n | lpr
Year change
While using the -3 switch for printing of three actual months
(i.e. november, december, january) some month is not printed.
Solved: upgrade to version 2.1, where this bug is already fixed.
Thanks to Jára Altmann for bugreport.
Bugs from version 1.1
There's only a few lines left from 1.0 and the rest was completely rewritten.
The old bugs seem to be gone. The configuration doesn't become invalid after one year and you don't have to set it up again.
The brain-damage of the old configuration files has also been eliminated.
If you think you found a bug, don't hesitate to use your favourite mail client
and mail me.
Changelog
2.3 (Jul 17th, 2003)
- fixed incorrect displaying of some day names
2.2 (May 22nd, 2003)
- fixed error message typo
2.1 (December 9th, 2002)
- bugfix: some months are not printed if '-3' is used
- optimization of counting menstruation days
2.0 (March 29th, 2002)
- initial primitive version total rewrited
- more configurations available
- merging of configurations
- other program switches
- non-colored output
- actual three months can be printed
1.1 (October 25th, 2000)
- configuration can be saved
- some minor bugfixes
- localization (use of locales)
1.0 (mesozoic era)
- initial primitive version
Archive
Misc
I thank Vinil for the his intensive cooperation, inspiration and propagation
(the quote about timing is from him too) and JD for testing, moral backing
and correction.
And here's an inspiring response from the maintainer of the mencal debian package:
I really love this script, because nobody but you ever bothered writing it :-)
I am very proud of you because you wrote this for your girlfriend and
I guess that was an act of love :-)
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