message - interactive text widgets
message pathName ?options?
message(1t) Tk Built-In Commands message(1t)
______________________________________________________________________________
NAME
message - Create and manipulate 'message' non-interactive text widgets
SYNOPSIS
message pathName ?options?
STANDARD OPTIONS
-anchor -background -borderwidth
-cursor -font -foreground
-highlightbackground -highlightcolor -highlightthickness
-padx -pady -relief
-takefocus -text -textvariable
See the options manual entry for details on the standard options.
WIDGET-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
Command-Line Name:-aspect
Database Name: aspect
Database Class: Aspect
Specifies a non-negative integer value indicating desired aspect
ratio for the text. The aspect ratio is specified as
100*width/height. 100 means the text should be as wide as it is
tall, 200 means the text should be twice as wide as it is tall,
50 means the text should be twice as tall as it is wide, and so
on. Used to choose line length for text if -width option is not
specified. Defaults to 150.
Command-Line Name:-justify
Database Name: justify
Database Class: Justify
Specifies how to justify lines of text. Must be one of left,
center, or right. Defaults to left. This option works together
with the -anchor, -aspect, -padx, -pady, and -width options to
provide a variety of arrangements of the text within the window.
The -aspect and -width options determine the amount of screen
space needed to display the text. The -anchor, -padx, and -pady
options determine where this rectangular area is displayed
within the widget's window, and the -justify option determines
how each line is displayed within that rectangular region. For
example, suppose -anchor is e and -justify is left, and that the
message window is much larger than needed for the text. The
text will be displayed so that the left edges of all the lines
line up and the right edge of the longest line is -padx from the
right side of the window; the entire text block will be cen-
tered in the vertical span of the window.
Command-Line Name:-width
Database Name: width
Database Class: Width
Specifies the length of lines in the window. The value may have
any of the forms acceptable to Tk_GetPixels. If this option has
a value greater than zero then the -aspect option is ignored and
the -width option determines the line length. If this option
has a value less than or equal to zero, then the -aspect option
determines the line length.
______________________________________________________________________________
DESCRIPTION
The message command creates a new window (given by the pathName argu-
ment) and makes it into a message widget. Additional options,
described above, may be specified on the command line or in the option
database to configure aspects of the message such as its colors, font,
text, and initial relief. The message command returns its pathName
argument. At the time this command is invoked, there must not exist a
window named pathName, but pathName's parent must exist.
A message is a widget that displays a textual string. A message widget
has three special features that differentiate it from a label widget.
First, it breaks up its string into lines in order to produce a given
aspect ratio for the window. The line breaks are chosen at word bound-
aries wherever possible (if not even a single word would fit on a line,
then the word will be split across lines). Newline characters in the
string will force line breaks; they can be used, for example, to leave
blank lines in the display.
The second feature of a message widget is justification. The text may
be displayed left-justified (each line starts at the left side of the
window), centered on a line-by-line basis, or right-justified (each
line ends at the right side of the window).
The third feature of a message widget is that it handles control char-
acters and non-printing characters specially. Tab characters are
replaced with enough blank space to line up on the next 8-character
boundary. Newlines cause line breaks. Other control characters (ASCII
code less than 0x20) and characters not defined in the font are dis-
played as a four-character sequence \xhh where hh is the two-digit
hexadecimal number corresponding to the character. In the unusual case
where the font does not contain all of the characters in
"0123456789abcdef\x" then control characters and undefined characters
are not displayed at all.
WIDGET COMMAND
The message command creates a new Tcl command whose name is pathName.
This command may be used to invoke various operations on the widget.
It has the following general form:
pathName option ?arg arg ...?
Option and the args determine the exact behavior of the command. The
following commands are possible for message widgets:
pathName cget option
Returns the current value of the configuration option given by
option. Option may have any of the values accepted by the mes-
sage command.
pathName configure ?option? ?value option value ...?
Query or modify the configuration options of the widget. If no
option is specified, returns a list describing all of the avail-
able options for pathName (see Tk_ConfigureInfo for information
on the format of this list). If option is specified with no
value, then the command returns a list describing the one named
option (this list will be identical to the corresponding sublist
of the value returned if no option is specified). If one or
more option-value pairs are specified, then the command modifies
the given widget option(s) to have the given value(s); in this
case the command returns an empty string. Option may have any
of the values accepted by the message command.
DEFAULT BINDINGS
When a new message is created, it has no default event bindings: mes-
sages are intended for output purposes only.
BUGS
Tabs do not work very well with text that is centered or right-justi-
fied. The most common result is that the line is justified wrong.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+---------------+------------------+
|ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+---------------+------------------+
|Availability | runtime/tk-8 |
+---------------+------------------+
|Stability | Uncommitted |
+---------------+------------------+
SEE ALSO
label(n)
KEYWORDS
message, widget
NOTES
Source code for open source software components in Oracle Solaris can
be found at https://www.oracle.com/downloads/opensource/solaris-source-
code-downloads.html.
This software was built from source available at
https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland. The original community
source was downloaded from https://source-
forge.net/projects/tcl/files/Tcl/8.6.7/tk8.6.7-src.tar.gz/download.
Further information about this software can be found on the open source
community website at https://www.tcl.tk/.
Tk 4.0 message(1t)