message(n)                   Tk Built-In Commands                   message(n)



NAME
       message - Create and manipulate message widgets

SYNOPSIS
       (message widget-name ?options?)
       :anchor   :font     :highlightthickness :takefocus
       :background    :foreground    :padx     :text
       :borderwidth   :highlightbackground     :pady     :textvariable
       :cursor   :highlightcolor     :relief   :width

WIDGET-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
       [:aspect 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.
       [:justify 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.  [:width 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 procedure creates a new window (given by the widget-name
       argument) and makes it into a message widget.  Additional options,
       described above, may be specified on the procedure line or in the
       option database to configure aspects of the message such as its colors,
       font, text, and initial relief.  The message procedure returns its
       widget-name argument.  At the time this procedure is invoked, there
       must not exist a window named widget-name, but widget-name'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 PROCEDURE
       The message procedure creates a new STk procedure whose name is
       widget-name.  This procedure may be used to invoke various operations
       on the widget.  It has the following general form: (widget-name option
       ?arg arg ...?)  Option and the args determine the exact behavior of the
       procedure.  The following procedures are possible for message widgets:

       (widget-name 'cget option)
              Returns the current value of the configuration option given by
              option.  Option may have any of the values accepted by the
              message procedure.

       (widget-name '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 widget-name (see Tk_ConfigureInfo for
              information on the format of this list).  If option is specified
              with no value, then the procedure 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 procedure modifies the given widget option(s) to have
              the given value(s);  in this case the procedure returns an empty
              string.  Option may have any of the values accepted by the
              message procedure.


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



STk                                   3.1                           message(n)
