Message(3pm)						User Contributed Perl Documentation					      Message(3pm)

NAME

       Tk::Message - Create and manipulate Message widgets

SYNOPSIS

       $message = $parent->Message(?options?);

STANDARD OPTIONS

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

       See Tk::options for details of the standard options.

WIDGET-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
       Name:	 aspect
       Class:	 Aspect
       Switch:	 -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.

       Name:	 justify
       Class:	 Justify
       Switch:	 -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.

       Name:	 width
       Class:	 Width
       Switch:	 -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 method creates a new window (given by the $widget 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 $widget argument.  At the time this command is invoked, there must not exist a window
       named $widget, but $widget'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
       ``0123456789abcdefx'' then control characters and undefined characters are not displayed at all.

WIDGET METHODS

       The Message method creates a widget object.  This object supports the configure and cget methods described in Tk::options which can be used
       to enquire and modify the options described above.  The widget also inherits all the methods provided by the generic Tk::Widget class.

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

perl v5.14.2							    2010-05-29							      Message(3pm)