oracular (3) Tk::Message.3pm.gz

NAME

       Tk::Message - Create and manipulate Message widgets

SYNOPSIS

           use Tk::Message;
           ...
           my $message = $parent->Message(
               -text => 'somewhat long message text',
               -aspect => 100,
               -justify => 'left',
           )->pack();

STANDARD OPTIONS

       -anchor   -font     -highlightthickness -takefocus -background    -foreground    -padx     -text
       -borderwidth   -highlightbackground     -pady     -textvariable
       -cursor   -highlightcolor     -relief   -width

       See Tk::options for details of the standard options.

WIDGET-SPECIFIC OPTIONS

       Name:     aspect
       Class:    Aspect
       Switch:   -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 isn't specified.  Defaults
           to 150.

       Name:     justify
       Class:    Justify
       Switch:   -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 the
           text will 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.

       Name:     width
       Class:    Width
       Switch:   -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 method creates a new window (given by the $widget 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 $widget argument.  At the time this command is invoked, there must not exist
       a window named $widget, but $widget'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 doesn't
       contain all of the characters in ``0123456789abcdef\x'' then control characters and undefined characters
       are not displayed at all.

WIDGET METHODS

       The Message method creates a widget object.  This object supports the configure and cget methods
       described in Tk::options which can be used to enquire and modify the options described above.  The widget
       also inherits all the methods provided by the generic Tk::Widget class.

DEFAULT BINDINGS

       When a new message is created, it has no default event bindings: messages are intended for output
       purposes only.

BUGS

       Tabs don't work very well with text that is centered or right-justified.  The most common result is that
       the line is justified wrong.

KEYWORDS

       message, widget