TrestleBoard

A month of the lodge, laid out in an evening.

TrestleBoard is a free program for one job: producing the trestle board your lodge sends out every month, and the PDF you email round when it is done. It runs on your own computer, keeps your members' details on it and nowhere else, and asks nothing of you but the evening.

Drawn by the program, not pasted into this page — one of nineteen emblems on its shelf, ready to go on a cover at any size.

Download it — version 1.4.0 See what it does
The TrestleBoard editor showing the front page of a newsletter: a cover heading, an article, and a photograph with the text flowing around it. Down the left is a column of small pages; down the right, a panel listing what this issue still needs.
The front page of an issue, part-written. The small pages down the left are this month's five sheets; the panel on the right says what is still missing and why.

Why it is not a word processor

Because a trestle board is a page, not a document. The officers table has to sit in the corner it always sits in, the photograph has to have the article close up behind it, and the whole thing has to come out at four to six sides every time.

TrestleBoard draws its own pages, and the same code draws the screen and the PDF. What you arrange is what prints — not an approximation of it, and not something that reflows on the machine you send it to.

Placeholder Lodge No. 000

Stated Communication

Brethren, the summer months bring their own rhythm to the lodge. Attendance thins as families travel, and yet the work continues much as it always has. There is a lesson in that steadiness. A lodge is not built out of its busiest nights. It is built out of the ordinary ones, when a handful of brothers turn up because they said they would, and the work gets done because it is there to be done.

That excerpt is set the way the program sets it, in one of the twenty typefaces that ship inside it. None of the fonts installed on your computer is ever used, which is what makes a newsletter fall on the same lines on every machine that opens it.

What a month looks like

Eleven months out of twelve it begins with Start from last month. The officers, the committees and the district table carry across, the dates move on, and last month's articles are cleared away so this month's can be written.

The editor with nothing selected. The right-hand panel is headed What's next and lists the things this month's newsletter still needs, each with a sentence saying why.
With nothing selected, the panel stops offering and starts reminding: the birthday list is still showing last month, an article still holds the words that were put there to prompt it, and no PDF has been made since the newsletter was opened.

Where to go next