Cuti-cuti Malaysia: Customisable State-by-state Holidays Calendar for 2020

Erm… I am sorry that I had neglected this blog to the point that it’s now the annual announcement for the Cuti-cuti Malaysia calendars 😅

But anyway, here it is. You can download the PDF customised for Penang here.

Federal public holidays are highlighted in solid shaded pink circles, as in 25–26 January. Public holidays that are applicable for your home state (Penang in the above example) would be highlighted in solid shaded purple circles, as in 1 January. Public holidays in other states (relative to your home state) are also highlighted, but only in a hollow purple circle. See e.g. 1 February (Federal Territory Day) which is a public holiday in Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya and Labuan, but not in Penang.

This year I’ve tried to add some code that automatically detects if the Monday after a public holiday (for states like Penang, Selangor…) would also be a holiday. For example, 26 Jan falls on a Sunday; therefore 27 Jan is also a holiday: this is highlighted in the calendar by a pink shaded circle but without a solid outline.

School holidays are also highlighted, though not shown in the above sample images.

If you’d like to generate your own calendar for your own home state, or to change the illustrations/fonts/colours/etc, you can download the source code and compile with XeLaTeX. If you have an Overleaf account, you can also visit my read-only project and clone it to your own Dashboard. See last year’s post for instructions on how to customise your calendar.

This year I’ve also updated the cdcalendar class so that the giant option would generate mini calendars for the previous and next month, upon a feature request from my daughter. (Children can often come up with the most useful and practical feature requests!) While implementing it, I was pleasantly surprised that TikZ’s calendar would correctly print December 2019’s calendar when presented with a date like 2020-0-01, and January 2021’s calendar when given 2020-13-01!

BTW if you would like to use Bahasa Melayu month headings instead, change

\documentclass[17pt,british,giant]{cdcalendar}

to

\documentclass[17pt,nobabel,giant]{cdcalendar}
\usepackage[bahasam]{babel}
\usepackage{ms-mod}

Data sources

The calendar data used in this sample were obtained from the following sources, and I cannot guarantee their accuracy and correctness.

1. Malaysian public holiday data was sourced from the Google Calendar here using the Google Calendars API, then converted to a tab-separated values file.
2. Malaysian school holiday data was sourced from the Malaysian Ministry of Education’s webpage.
3. Chinese lunar calendar data was sourced from here, converted to a CSV file and Simplified Chinese and some minor editing for typesetting purposes (inserting \\ for line breaks.

Happy New Year 2020!