tixDisplayStyle - Man Page

tixDisplayStyle itemType ?-stylename name? ?-refwindow pathName? ?options value ...?

The Tix Display Items mechanism is devised to solve a general problem: many Tix widgets (both existing and planned ones) display many items of many types simutaneously.

For example, a hierarchical listbox widget (HList) can display items of images, plain text and subwindows in the form of a hierarchy. Another widget, the tabular listbox, (TList, currently planned and will be released in Tix 4.1) also display items of the same types, although it arranges the items in a tabular form. Yet another widget, the spreadsheet widget, also displays similar types items, but in yet another format.

In these examples, the display items in different widgets are only different in how they are arranged by the host widget. In Tix, display items are clearly separated from the host widgets. The advantage is two-fold: first, the creation and configuration of display items become uniform across different host widgets. Second, new display item types can be added without the need to modify the existing host widgets.

In a way, Tix display items are similar to the items inside Tk the canvas widget. However, unlike the Tix display items, the canvas items are not independent of the canvas widget; this makes it impossible to use the canvas items inside other types of TK widgets.

The appearance of a display item is controlled by a set of attributes. It is observed that each the attributes usually fall into one of two categroies: "individual" or "collective". For example, the text items inside a HList widget may all display a different text string; however, in most cases, the text items share the same color, font and spacing. Instead of keeping a duplicated version of the same attributes inside each display item, it will be advantageous to put the collective attributes in a special object called a display style. First, there is the space concern: a host widget may have many thousands of items; keeping dupilcated attributes will be very wasteful. Second, when it becomes necessary to change a collective attribute, such as changing all the text items' foreground color to red, it will be more efficient to change only the display style object than to modify all the text items one by one.

The attributes of the a display item are thus stored in two places: it has a set of item options to store its individual attributes. Each display item is also associated with a display style, which specifies the collective attributes of all items associated with itself.

The division between the individual and collective attributes are fixed and cannot be changed. Thus, when it becomes necessary for some items to differ in their collective attributes, two or more display styles can be used. For example, suppose you want to display two columns of text items inside an HList widget, one column in red and the other in blue. You can create a TextStyle object called "red", which defines a red foreground, and another called "blue", which defines a blue foreground. You can then associate all text items of the first column to "red" and the second column to "blue".

Currently there are four types of display items: text, image, imagetext and window. (TODO: need to document the "image" item)

Display items of the type imagetext are used to display an image together with a text string. Imagetext items support the following options:

ITEM OPTIONS

STYLE OPTIONS

The style information of imagetext items are stored in the imagetext display style. The following options are supported:

Display items of the type text are used to display a text string in a widget. Text items support the following options:

ITEM OPTIONS

STYLE OPTIONS

STANDARD OPTIONS

activeBackground	activeForeground
anchor	background
disabledBackground	disabledForeground
foreground	font
justify	padX
padY	selectBackground
selectForeground	wrapLength

See the options(n) manual entry for details on the standard options.

Display items of the type window are used to display a sub-window in a widget. Window items support the following options:

ITEM OPTIONS

STYLE OPTIONS

STANDARD OPTIONS

anchor
padX		padY

See the options(n) manual entry for details on the standard options.

Display items do not exist on their and thus they cannot be created independently of the widgets they reside in. As a rule, display items are created by special widget commands of their "host" widgets. For example, the HList widgets has a command item which can be used to create new display items. The following code creates a new imagetext item at the third column of the entry foo inside an HList widget:

 tixHList .h -columns 3
 .h add foo
 .h item create foo 2 -itemtype imagetext -text Hello -image image1

The item create command of the HList widget accepts a variable number of arguments. The special argument -itemtype specifies which type of display item to create. Options that are valid for this type of display items can then be specified by one or more option-value pairs.

After the display item is created, they can then be configured or destroyed using the commands provided by the host widget. For example, the HList widget has the command item configure, item cget and item delete for accessing the display items.

Display styles are created by the command tixDisplayStyle:

itemType must be one of the existing display items types such as text, imagetext, window or any new types added by the user. Additional arguments can be given in one or more option-value pairs. option can be any of the valid option for this display style or any of the following:

The tixDisplayStyle command creates a new Tcl command whose name is the same as the name of the newly created display style.  This command may be used to invoke various operations on the display style.  It has the following general form:

styleName is the name of the command. Option and the args determine the exact behavior of the command. The following commands are possible:

styleName cget option

Returns the current value of the configuration option given by option. Option may have any of the valid options of this display style.

styleName configure ?option? ?value option value ...?

Query or modify the configuration options of the display style.  If no option is specified, returns a list describing all of the available options for styleName (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 option(s) to have the given value(s); in this case the command returns an empty string. Option may have any of the valid options of this display style.

styleName delete

Destroy this display style object.

The following example creates two columns of data in a HList widget. The first column is in red and the second column in blue. The colors of the columns are controlled by two different text styles. Also, the anchor and font of the second column is chosen so that the income data is aligned properly.

set courier {courier 14} set h [tixHList .h -columns 2]; pack $h set red  [tixDisplayStyle text -fg #800000] set blue [tixDisplayStyle text -fg #000080 \
         -anchor e -font $courier]

foreach n {{Joe $10,000} {Peter $20,000} {Raj $90,000}} {
   set entry [$h addchild {}]
   $h item create $entry 0 -itemtype text \ -text [lindex $n 0] -style $red
   $h item create $entry 1 -itemtype text \ -text [lindex $n 1] -style $blue }

display item, display style, imagetext