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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
       Command-Line Name:-aspect
       Database Name:  aspect
       Database Class: 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.

       Command-Line Name:-justify
       Database Name:  justify
       Database Class: 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.

       Command-Line Name:-width
       Database Name:  width
       Database Class: 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-justi-fied right-justified
       fied (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 charac-ters characters
       ters specially.  Tab characters are replaced with enough blank space to line up on the next 8-charac-ter 8-character
       ter  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 does
       not contain all of the characters in "0123456789abcdef\x" then control characters and undefined char-acters characters
       acters 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 informa-tion information
              tion 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 correspond-ing corresponding
              ing 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  val-ues values
              ues 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)