Provided by: tk8.5-doc_8.5.19-3_all 
NAME
message - Create and manipulate message 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 centered 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.
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DESCRIPTION
The message command creates a new window (given by the pathName argument) 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. 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 boundaries 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 characters 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
displayed 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 message 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 available 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: messages are intended for
output purposes only.
BUGS
Tabs do not work very well with text that is centered or right-justified. The most common
result is that the line is justified wrong.
SEE ALSO
label(3tk)
KEYWORDS
message, widget