[Tkinter-discuss] New Full Tkinter document editor widget -- suggestions, comments, etc.

[Ron Provost]

I've posted a demo (http://tkinter.unpy.net/wiki/StyledEditor).  This demo 
creates a widget with full "styled editing" capabilities; sort of a 
mini-word processor.  It runs "as is" on my WinXP machine with Python 2.5. 
The demo allows styling of any selected text via toolbars; just select the 
text, then select the styling.  Also included are buttons to save and 
retrieve all content and styling information (works for the small tests I've 
tried myself, not guaranteed bug-free).

The actual widget wraps the Text widget to give greater freedom in the 
assignment of any single styling attribute to any region.  This differs from 
the Text widget itself in that the Text widget does not allow you to 
individually assign a family, size, weight or slant with tag_config().  That 
is, for example, you can't simply apply 'bold' to some region of text.

This demo was written quite quickly (I pounded it out over the weekend) so 
I'm sure it's full of bugs.  Also in my desire to get something working 
quickly its API doesn't really work like a normal widget, so I guess this 
serves as more of a proof of concept than full-blown widget but the basic 
functionality is there.  I'm presenting it here because I thought maybe 
others might have thoughts on how to improve it.

API Notes:

applyStyleAttribute( index1, index2, attributeName, attributeValue )

This method is is frontend to the business.  attributeName and 
attributeValue may be any option accpeted by tag_config() of the Text widget 
along with appropriate value.  There are also some ''new'' options:

- 'family', attributeValue is a font family name
- 'size', attributeValue is a font point size
- 'weight', attributeValue is one of: 'normal', 'bold'
- 'bold', attributeValue is a boolean (alternative to using 'weight')
- 'slant', attributeValue is one of: 'roman', 'italic'
- 'italic', attributeValue is boolean (alternative to using 'slant')

Several previously existing options have some new values:

'spacing1', 'spacing2' and 'spacing3' may take 'None', 'Half Line', 'One 
Line' or 'Two Lines' in addition to any of the values acceptable by 
tag_config().

'offset' may take 'normal', 'superscript' or 'subscript' in addition to any 
value acceptable by tag_config.

Please download and try-out my demo 
(http://tkinter.unpy.net/wiki/StyledEditor).  I'm anxious for suggestions 
and comments.

Ron Longo