Import ical

[Christer Hellholm]

Can I import iCal files into Affinity Publisher 2 as formatted text to be inserted in text frames?

I would like to put a range of from to date that shall be imported and how the text should look like.

[Dan C]

Hi @Christer Hellholm,

Thanks for your post!

52 minutes ago, Christer Hellholm said:

Can I import iCal files into Affinity Publisher 2 as formatted text to be inserted in text frames?

Unfortunately the Affinity apps don't support the iCal file format for import, our apologies.

You might be able to copy and paste from iCal into Publisher, but I'm not personally familiar with iCal and it's functionality - perhaps other Forum users with experience may be able to assist further

[Christer Hellholm]

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

Hi @Christer Hellholm,

Thanks for your post!

Unfortunately the Affinity apps don't support the iCal file format for import, our apologies.

You might be able to copy and paste from iCal into Publisher, but I'm not personally familiar with iCal and it's functionality - perhaps other Forum users with experience may be able to assist further

Perhaps it is something you can add in the future major version update of Affinity Publisher. I hardly believe that I am the only one that find this feature useful.

[R C-R]

If you mean files conforming to the iCalendar media type standard, note that these files can contain many different calendar components & their timestamps commonly appear in the UTC format, so a direct import of the file's text probably would not be of much use.

[thomaso]

7 hours ago, Christer Hellholm said:

I hardly believe that I am the only one that find this feature useful.

Why iCal in particular? You can rename the suffix of your iCal file to .txt and open that in APub – but the result won't be very satisfying because it seems to contain a lot more data (regarding the iCal app and interface?) than you might want to use in your text frames in APub.

For database-like content, APub has some compatibility with more common file types such as .xls or .csv, which are also used for APubs' Data Merge feature. It appears that you can convert your iCal file to .csv using various tools: convert ical to csv

A forum search for "calendar" lists many threads about calendar layout in APub. Some offer their result as Affinity document or link to calendar generator apps that could be used for APub layouts. For instance: