Making A Simple Printable 12 Month Calendar
Many of us rely on at least a few calendars to keep our lives in order and to plan ahead. I have multiple calendars on walls in my home, but for all the printed photo-beautiful calendars I've seen, I sometimes just want to see all the months and days of the year in one place, without having to flip through each month, or refer to my computer or smartphone to see where a particular date falls. Fortunately, I found a free solution that makes it easy to generate a printable letter-sized calendar any time using a terminal and a minute of formatting. This is easiest to do on macOS or Linux, but the same results can be achieved by installing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (admittedly more work but useful for other things too), then formatting the plain calendar text with a word processor such as Libre Office. Note that this roll-your-own calendar method produces a practical yearly calendar, not necessarily one anyone would find aesthetically appealing. :-)
Creating a Calendar using macOS
To make a single-page printable yearly calendar, do the following.
- Open the terminal. You can use Spotlight (COMMAND + SPACEBAR) to search for terminal.
- Enter cal, followed by the year to print, then hit ENTER. For example:
cal 2025Refer to the Outputting the Calendar to a Text File section, or Manually Copying and Pasting the Calendar to a Text File section below, as you like.
Creating a Calendar using Linux
Depending on your Linux distro, you may need to install ncal. There are other command line calendar options, including gcal, but ncal is the closest to the original cal command line utility.
To install ncal on Ubuntu, use the following terminal command:
sudo apt install ncalOther Linux distros use different package managers, so adjust the command accordingly.
Open the terminal and enter ncal, followed by the year to print, then hit ENTER. For example:
ncal 2025The year’s calendar corresponding to the year you entered will be output to the screen. This will work for virtually any past or future year (year 1 to 9999).
Outputting the Calendar to a Text File
You can easily have the terminal output the calendar as text to a file. With the terminal active, change the path to the current local Desktop by entering the following command:
cd ~/DesktopDirect the output from the terminal to a text file with the cal or ncal command:
ncal 2025 > 2025.txtThis will save a text file to your desktop with the text of the entire calendar. You can then open the text file in Preview, LibreOffice, etc., then format it by following the steps listed below.
Manually Copying and Pasting the Calendar to a Text File
You can use the computer clipboard to copy and paste the text from the terminal into macOS Preview. To do this, follow the steps below.
- Copy the entire calendar, beginning before the year at the top, all the way to the end of the last day of the year.
- Open a new Preview document and paste the contents from the clipboard.
- With the text from the calendar in an open file in Preview, format the calendar by following the steps below.
Formatting the Calendar
The typeface needs to be monospaced to maintain the formatting from the copied terminal text. An easy to read monospaced typeface for macOS is Menlo, which is preinstalled. Cascadia Code is a good choice if you are not using the macOS platform.
- Select all the pasted text in the document and set it to Menlo Regular 12.
- Double-click the year of the calendar and set it to Menlo Regular 24.
- Double-click each month to quickly select just the month name, and boldface it. This will make the month names use the Menlo Bold 12 typeface.
- Save the document.
That's it.
You can now print the document, which should print well as a portrait-oriented page, or you can save the document as a PDF and have a simple to use or print calendar any time.
Download the Calendar Files for 2025
Below are RTF and PDF files for the 2025 calendar.