Provided by: tk8.4-doc_8.4.20-7_all 
NAME
message - Create and manipulate message widgets
SYNOPSIS
message pathName ?options?
STANDARD OPTIONS
-anchor -highlightbackground -takefocus
-background -highlightcolor -text
-borderwidth -highlightthickness -textvariable
-cursor -padx -width
-font -pady
-foreground -relief
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 isn't 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 doesn't
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 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
Tk 4.0 message(3tk)