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

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NAME

       message - Create and manipulate message widgets

SYNOPSIS

       message pathName ?options?

STANDARD OPTIONS

       -anchor		     -background	  -borderwidth
       -cursor		     -font		  -foreground
       -highlightbackground  -highlightcolor	  -highlightthickness
       -padx		     -pady		  -relief
       -takefocus	     -text		  -textvariable

       See the options manual entry for details on the standard options.

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 is not 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 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.   [-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.
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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 hexa-
       decimal	number	corresponding  to  the	character.   In  the  unusual  case  where  the  font  does  not  contain all of the characters in
       "0123456789abcdefx" 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 do not work very well with text that is centered or right-justified.  The most common result is that the line is justified wrong.

SEE ALSO

       label(n)

KEYWORDS

       message, widget

Tk									4.0								message(n)