Design Your Own Chinese Calendar

With this page it is as simple as 1,2,3 to create a Chinese calendar with a picture of your choice. Just upload the picture and a PDF file containing that picture and the calendar of your choice will be returned. For your privacy, any pictures you upload and any generated calendars will not be archived on this server. You need to verify that an uploaded picture does not infringe on other people's copyrights. If you select the calendar share option, the generated calendars will be saved for 7 days before they are automatically deleted. Most popular image formats are supported but the size of the file containing the picture must be less than approximately 3 MB, which should be enough for most 3+ megapixel images taken by a digital camera. The picture will be scaled proportionally to fit the empty space above the calendar. One point to note is that for this application, given same file size, a highly compressed high resolution image tends to given better printed result than one with lower resolution and less compression. If you have limited bandwidth or low-resolution printer, you may choose standard image quality below to reduce the size of the returned calendar. Take a look at the examples of customized monthly and yearly calendars.

Step 1: Specify an image. For best result, the image should be horizontal, or in other words, in landscape mode. For yearly calendar, a width to height ratio of approximately 2:1 will leave least empty space. For monthly calendar, the best ratio is approximately 4:3. Enable Auto crop feature in the next step if you want the image to fully fill the space above the calendar. If you use A4 paper, make the picture height slightly larger. The file size must be less than approximately 3 MB. The image may reside on a web or ftp server in which case the full URL should be entered below. In Internet Explorer, the full URL of an image may be obtained by right-clicking the image and select properties in the pop-up menu. Once the image is ready, fill in the name of the file or full URL of the image below:

Step 2: Select the desired properties of your customized Chinese calendar:

Paper type: US-Letter size ISO-A4 size

Character type: Simplified Characters Traditional Characters

Image quality: Standard High

Calendar share: Keep 7 days No

Auto crop: On Off

If the calendar share option is selected, a generated calendar may be accessed using the returned URL for it for 7 days before that URL becomes invalid. If the browser does not show the returned URL after you have made the calendar and continues to show this page, check this link. To delete a shared calendar before it expires, just make the same calendar again but with "No" for this option. If on, auto crop will crop the largest possible center area of the picture that has the correct aspect ratio for the empty space above the calendar.

Step 3: Specify month, year. If desired, the same picture can be put on multiple calendars at once. Click the "" button below to enter additional choices. Then click the "Get My Calendar" button:

Month Year

Please click this button only once and do not click Refresh/Reload. Depending on the size of your image and the network status, it may take sometime to load your customized calendar.

Valid years are from 1645 to 7000. However, accuracy gradually decreases beyond 300 years from Year 2000. For historical years, the returned calendar is accurate to astronomical events during that period but in a few cases may be different from what was actually used since the algorithms used in those times were less accurate.

Additional notes:

Please note that the lunar month(s) in month header refers to new lunar month(s) to start in that solar month unless there is no new lunar month in that solar month in which case the header refers to the current running lunar month.

If the printed calendar shows broken strokes for some Chinese characters, that is often due to low print quality setting. Choosing best quality option in printer setup usually corrects the problem.

Please do not bookmark the returned calendar. Since neither the uploaded image nor the generated PDF calendar is archived on the server, there is no way to regenerate the calendar when you choose the page through a bookmark or history. The Refresh/Reload button may not work either for the same reason so do not click it.

Please note that Internet Explorer 5.5 and earlier contains a bug (Q254337) and may not display the generated calendar correctly. If you see error messages or blank window after possibly the Adobe Acrobat Reader flash screen, you need to patch or upgrade your browser. IE 5.5 SP2 and later versions are supposed to work correctly. A work-around has been added but may not catch all problem cases. You may want to test with a small picture on monthly calendar first. You can also use a different browser such as Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape.

On Macintosh, please use binary mode to upload the image. Do not use MacBinary mode. MacBinary mode includes tags that are only useful on Macintosh machines and serves to garble the image on other operating systems.

When viewing with Acrobat Reader, the Chinese text may appear more visually pleasing if you set Acrobat Reader to smooth line art. For version 5.0, you can set that up by bring up the Preferences dialog using menu Edit | Preferences..., and in the display section, check the smooth line art box under the Smoothing group. Without this option, the Chinese text may appear bold and jagged on the screen. However, that is only a screen artifact, the printed result will still be sharp and clear with or without this option.

If you are prompted to save the returned file, please use .pdf as the file extension if it is not yet shown as the suggested extension. If you print through Adobe Acrobat, you may want to clear the "Shrink oversized pages to paper size" box. Otherwise, the page margins may be larger than necessary.

Back to Make Your Own Chinese Calendar

Created by: Zhuo Meng (zxm8@case.edu)

Usual disclaimer applies