[Tex/LaTex] Schedule in LaTeX

calendar

I'm looking for a way to type a weekly schedule in LaTeX. The only problematic part is that it's possible that there is overlap in entries.

I looked at “LaTeX Classes or Styles for Schedules and/or Calendars?” but it's not the type of schedule/calendar I'm looking for.

I also looked at the schedule.sty package but it doesn't provides a way to deal with overlapping entries.

An example of entries in this schedule would be: 

Monday 8am to 12am: Virtual Reality,
Monday 8am to 10am: Real time networks,
Monday 1pm to 4pm : ESOA, ...

Example of output based on the entries above

Does anyone has a way to generate weekly schedules with LaTeX ?

Best Answer

I couldn't resist: Here is one way to draw this with TikZ. To make it nicer to use, there should be some additional wrapper around it, that automatically calculates the horizontal placement of the nodes. Besides that, the code is astonishingly non-verbose.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}

\begin{document}

% These set the width of a day and the height of an hour.
\newcommand*\daywidth{6cm}
\newcommand*\hourheight{1.2em}

% The entry style will have two options:
% * the first option sets how many hours the entry will be (i.e. its height);
% * the second option sets how many overlapping entries there are (thus
%   determining the width).
\tikzset{entry/.style 2 args={
    draw,
    rectangle,
    anchor=north west,
    line width=0.4pt,
    inner sep=0.3333em,
    text width={\daywidth/#2-0.6666em-0.4pt},
    minimum height=#1*\hourheight,
    align=center
}}

% Start the picture and set the x coordinate to correspond to days and the y
% coordinate to correspond to hours (y should point downwards).
\begin{tikzpicture}[y=-\hourheight,x=\daywidth]

    % First print a list of times.
    \foreach \time/\ustime in {8/8am,9/9am,10/10am,11/11am,12/12pm,13/1pm,14/2pm,15/3pm,16/4pm,17/5pm,18/6pm}
        \node[anchor=north east] at (1,\time) {\ustime};

    % Draw some day dividers.
    \draw (1,6.5) -- (1,19);
    \draw (2,6.5) -- (2,19);
    \draw (3,6.5) -- (3,19);

    % Start Monday.
    \node[anchor=north] at (1.5,6.5) {Monday};
    % Write the entries. Note that the x coordinate is 1 (for Monday) plus an
    % appropriate amount of shifting. The y coordinate is simply the starting
    % time.
    \node[entry={4}{2}] at (1,8) {Virtual Reality};
    \node[entry={3}{2}] at (1.5,8) {Realtime Network};
    \node[entry={3}{1}] at (1,13) {EOSA};

    % The same for Tuesday.
    \node[anchor=north] at (2.5,6.5) {Tuesday};
    \node[entry={3.5}{3}] at (2,9) {Class A};
    \node[entry={2.5}{3}] at (2.33333,9.5) {Class B};
    \node[entry={2.5}{3}] at (2.66667,10) {Class C};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

result

Of course, you can apply all the power of TikZ to actually make it look better (or worse...). For example, by simply replacing the \tikzset with

\tikzset{entry/.style 2 args={
    xshift=(0.5334em+0.8pt)/2,
    draw,
    line width=0.8pt,
    font=\sffamily,
    rectangle,
    rounded corners,
    fill=blue!20,
    anchor=north west,
    inner sep=0.3333em,
    text width={\daywidth/#2-1.2em-1.6pt},
    minimum height=#1*\hourheight,
    align=center
}}

one obtains

example 2

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