Mailman 3 March 2004 - Tkinter-discuss

Inserting a unicode zero-width nonbreaking space into a Text widget, from Tkinter, on a Mac
by Kenneth McDonald Nov. 3, 2004

Nov. 3, 2004

As the subject says, I am attempting to insert a particular unicode character (\ufeff) into a Text widget, from Python. This is not quite working correctly, and I'm not sure if the problem is between Python and Tcl, or is a problem of OS X not properly knowing the character. This character is supposed to be a 0-width space, and using Python's unicodedata.name function confirms that feff is in fact the proper unicode sequence. The character is construction using a one-character python string: zws = u"\ufeff" And then passed to Text's insert command. Unfortunately, what shows up on screen is a complex (perhaps Chinese) asian ideograph. "Python in a Nutshell" indicates that all communication between Tkinter and Tk is in unicode, so I had hoped this would transfer correctly. Not sure if I need to do some conversion or not...could there be a conflict between a straight Unicode (16-bit) representation and a UTF-8 representation? Or do I need to do an OS setting to make sure the OS and the internal representation are on the same wavelength? Thanks, Ken

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Tools for summarizing a module?
by Kenneth McDonald April 15, 2004

April 15, 2004

Before I start any documentation effort on Tkinter, I'd like to get a good idea of what's in there right now. Is there a good tool that will go through a module, and print out, in summary form, its functions, classes, methods, etc., with docstrings if present? If not, I'll write my own, but why waste effort if this has already been done? Thanks, Ken

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Text widget, fonts, on OS X: questions and thoughts
by Kenneth McDonald March 30, 2004

March 30, 2004

Hi all. I am trying to change the font associated with a tag in a Text widget. Since there is no "direct" way (that I can see) to do this in Tkinter, I'm (somewhat circuitously) doing something which should according to my understanding of Tkinter and Tk, eventually result in a call on the Tk side somewhat of the form: tag configure mytag font { -family system -size 10 } (Not too sure about the quoting.) I don't make the call directly (it gets built out of some more abstract structures I've implemented), so it may be slightly different from what I've shown above--but it does execute and it does result in a slightly different font being displayed. Unfortunately, the "other" font is just barely smaller than the "default" fault, and more to the point, none of the font attributes--size, family, weight, slant--have any effect upon it. Tomorrow is going to be devoted to solving this (hopefully not all day), but before I got into it, I wanted to ask: 1) Are there any known problems with using other fonts in the Text widget under OS X? 2) Would anyone care to provide a short (2-4 line) snippet of Python code that they know correctly changes a tag's font? Now, back to a subject that created a brief flurry of activity a bit ago, but has since died down--but not in my mind! That's the subject of Tkinter documentation. I have a plan in mind for starting out, which I'll begin this week, hopefully, and seek feedback from the mailing list as I start coming up with things. However, as I do more work with Tkinter in general, and with the Text widget in particular, I'm also coming to believe that part of the "documentation" problem is in fact a problem of multilingualism--even if Tkinter were beautifully documented right now, it's still too close to the Tk level to be easily learned and used but people who _don't_ want to learn Tk. I'm finding myself wrapping a lot of things (font will be one) in Python classes to (almost completely) hide their Tkness, and to add functionality. Anyone interested in doing more of that sort of thing? Do you think it's a good idea? And, does anyone know the current maintainer of Tkinter, so I can contact them and see if they'd be willing to include further code? Thanks, Ken

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How do you get your application to open up with a specific, static siz e?
by clnethery＠juno.com March 26, 2004

March 26, 2004

I am developing an application that I want to open up at a specific size. For some reason, I cannot get the application to open up full-size. When I run it, it is minimized and all scrunched up. Specifically, I am wondering why the following line, "Mainframe = Tkinter.Frame(root, width=1015, height=705)" doesn't automatically open the application fullsize. The following code illustrates what I am referring to: import sys import Tkinter import Pmw root = Tkinter.Tk() root.title('Tool') Pmw.initialise(root) Mainframe = Tkinter.Frame(root, width=1015, height=705) ### menubar ### class AtsMenuBar: menuDict = { } def __init__(self): menuBar=Pmw.MenuBar(Mainframe, hull_relief='raised', hull_borderwidth=1) menuBar.pack(fill='x') menuBar.addmenu('File', 'Close this window or exit') menuBar.addcascademenu('File', 'New', 'Set some other preferences', traverseSpec = 'z', tearoff = 1) menuBar.addmenuitem('File', 'command', 'Save this application', command='save', label='Save') menuBar.addmenuitem('File', 'command', 'Open up SaveAs dialog', command='saveas', label='Save As') menuBar.addmenuitem('File', 'separator') menuBar.addmenuitem('File', 'command', 'Exit the application', command='exit', label='Exit') menuBar.addmenu('Edit', 'Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All or Delete') menuBar.addmenuitem('Edit', 'command', 'Undo last action', command='undo', label='Undo') menuBar.addmenuitem('Edit', 'command', 'Cut the current selection', command='cut', label='Cut') menuBar.addmenuitem('Edit', 'command', 'Copy the current selection', command='copy', label='Copy') menuBar.addmenuitem('Edit', 'command', 'Paste the current selection', command='paste', label='Paste') menuBar.addmenuitem('Edit', 'command', 'Select All', command='selectAll', label='Select All') menuBar.addmenuitem('Edit', 'command', 'Delete', command='delete', label='Delete') menuBar.addmenu('Help', 'Help Topics', 'About') menuBar.addmenuitem('Help', 'command', 'Show help topics', command='helptopics', label='Help topics') menuBar.addmenuitem('Help', 'command', 'Show About window', command='AboutUs', label='About Us') menuBar.addcascademenu('New', 'Thing', 'Set some other preferences', traverseSpec = 'z', tearoff = 1) menuBar.addmenuitem('New', 'command', 'Thing2', command = 'Thing2', label = 'Thing2') menuBar.addmenuitem('New', 'command', 'Thing3', command = 'Thing3', label = 'Thing3') menuBar.addmenuitem('Thing', 'command', 'Stuff1', command = 'Stuff1', label = 'Stuff1') menuBar.addmenuitem('Thing', 'command', 'Stuff2', command = 'Stuff2', label = 'Stuff2') menuBar.addmenuitem('Thing', 'command', 'Stuff3', command = 'Stuff3', label = 'Stuff3') menuBar.addmenuitem('Thing', 'command', 'Stuff4', command = 'Stuff4', label = 'Stuff4') menuBar.addmenuitem('Thing', 'command', 'Stuff5', command = 'Stuff5', label = 'Stuff5') menu = AtsMenuBar() Mainframe.pack(fill = 'both', expand = 1, padx = 5, pady = 5) if __name__ == '__main__': try: root.mainloop() except: sys.exit('\nUnexpected exception. Terminating application.')

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Gmane picked us up.
by Cameron Laird March 23, 2004

March 23, 2004

The TkinterDiscuss Wiki page has a pertinent hyperlink.

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(no subject)
by Kenneth McDonald March 23, 2004

March 23, 2004

From previous message: --------------------------------------------- So where you're trying to do text.insert(0.0, "blah", [other, args, here]) you should try text.insert(0.0, "blah", tuple([other, args, here])) or text.insert(0.0, "blah", *[other, args, here]) or text.insert(0.0, "blah", other, args, here) ----------------------------------------------- And to be a little pickier, that should probably be something like: text.insert("1.0", ...) as Text indexes of the n.n form are (a) still strings, and (b) count lines from 1, not from 0. "0.0" will probably work, but if it does, it will refer to the same location as "1.0" However, I'm surprised from the above that text.insert(0.0, "blah", tuple([other, args, here])) would work. Why wouldn't that have the same problem as text.insert(0.0, "blah", [other, args, here]) Thanks, Ken McDonald

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Python->Tcl lists
by Jason Harper March 23, 2004

March 23, 2004

Does Tkinter provide any way of properly converting a Python list to a Tcl list? Specifically, I am trying to insert text into a Text widget with multiple tags, which is supposedly allowed by passing a list of tag names. However, passing a Python list doesn't work - as far as I can tell, the list just gets converted with str() and then split on whitespace! The results (as verified with .tag_names()) is a mishmash of word fragments, including commas, quote marks, and brackets that could have only come from the stringification of the list: no such characters were actually part of the tags in the list. Jason Harper

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More thoughts on Tkinter documentation
by Kenneth McDonald March 23, 2004

March 23, 2004

Here are two more ideas for how to proceed with Tkinter documentation. 1) Is it possible to set up some sort of "structured wiki", where a) Some people can set up documentation structure, and others can add to it. b) Anyone can go in and write documentation in a section, and the "owner" of the section can then integrate (or discard) what has been contributed. For me, this would work well. If I needed to know something, go look at the online document. If my answer is there, great. If my answer isn't there, I have to go and figure it out myself-- and having done that, it isn't much more time to go back and type in what I've found. 2) I'm still a big fan of inline documentation. However, I don't really like docstrings because they don't provide enough structure or analytical power, especially for a fairly complex interface like Tkinter. I think it would be rather cool to define a more structured form of inline documentation, eg. a __doct__ special field (combination of doc and dict) field, where, given a function def f(foo, bar): .... The doct object for the function could be something like: __doct__ = dict( args=dict( foo="This argument is never used.", bar="Neither is this one!" ), return="Returns None or an integer", see=["otherfun1", "otherfun2"] examples = [...,...,...] ) and so on. I like this for a number of reasons. It is easy to write tools to check the validity of the documentation (i.e. are all arguments described? Are any arguments described which don't actually exist?). More importantly (at least in the short run), it would be quite easy to write a little script which, given Tkinter documented in this form, could nicely format and present the information in the doct objects at various levels of detail. I could also conceive of writing docts _outside_ of Tkinter (referring to the appropriate methods/funs/etc by name), and then either include them in Tkinter as a separate file, or write a script to do an automatic integration. (There are definite advantages to the separate approach, as long as it is done in a manner which allows tools such as referred to above to work.) As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that's preventing me from contributing documentation right now is that I have no structure to hang it on. I am embarrassed to confess that I have never used CVS in any significant way (my background is scripting/tech writing, not large project programming), and in any case wouldn't want to go into Tkinter to do documentation without a more structured approach than docstrings. Any thoughts on the above? I can't do much about (1) myself, but if I receive any positive feedback about (2), I'll put together a couple of docts for a bit of Tkinter stuff, and post them to see if people think its worth continuing. Cheers, Ken

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Another Pmw Question: Cascading OptionMenu
by clnethery＠juno.com March 19, 2004

March 19, 2004

I have another question--this time regarding the OptionMenu widget. Is anyone aware of an existing cascading OptionMenu widget? I attempted to re-write the OptionMenu widget by renaming it something else and incorporating what seemed like all of the cascading-related code from menubar (seemed like a good idea at the time). I added the widget to the Pmw definition file, added '('hotkeys', 1, INITOPT) to "optiondefs" in the new widget's '__init__' function(really OptionMenu's __init__ function)... Everything worked splendidly until the program failed to run, with an error that still keeps me up nights. I don't recall the specific error, but I'm guessing that I might be trying to reinvent the wheel, so I thought I'd ask before I cause myself any more trouble. Note to self: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.

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Good source for Tkinter example code
by Stewart Midwinter March 19, 2004

March 19, 2004

There's a good source for Tkinter example code, in the context of a 6-part student-oriented tutorial at Bryce Embry's website: http://bembry.org/tech/python/notes/tkinter_1.php If you're not using Idle, don't forget to add root.mainloop() to all his code examples! -- Stewart Midwinter Calgary, Alberta stewart 'at' midwinter 'dot' ca

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