Text and TextField Widget

For basic prompts and dialogs, the Text or TextField widget is recommended. Besides resources, all of the XmTextField and XmText functions are available for getting and for setting localized text inside a Text[Field] widget.

Most XmText functions are based on the number of characters, not on the number of bytes. For example, all XmTextPosition() function positions are character positions, not byte positions. The XmTextGetMaxLength() function returns the number of bytes. When in doubt, remember that positions are always in character units.

The width of a Text or TextField widget is determined by the resource value of XmNcolumns. But, this value means the number of the widest characters in the font set, not the number of bytes or columns. For example, suppose that you have selected a variable-width font for the Text widget. The character i may have a width of 1 pixel, while the character W may have a width of 7 pixels. When a value of 10 is set for XmNcolumns, this is considered a request to make the Text widget wide enough to be able to display at least 10 characters. So the Text widget must use the width of the widest character to determine the pixel width of its core widget. With this example, it may be able to display 10 W characters in the widget, or 70 i characters. This structure for XmNcolumns may cause problems in locales whose code set is a multibyte and a multicolumn encoding. As such, this value should be set within a localized resource.

The following section identifies the set of functions available for applications that are used to manage input methods. For applications that use the Text and TextField widgets, refer to "Input Method (Keyboards)".