NAME

       Tk::Message - Create and manipulate Message widgets

SYNOPSIS

       $message = $parent->Message(?options?);

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