Tk8.0 (Skunkware98)

Tk 8.0 is a major release with significant new features such as native look and feel on Macintoshes and PCs, a new font mechanism, application embedding, and proper support for Safe-Tcl. There should be no backward incompatibilities in Tk 8.0 that affect scripts.

Note: with this release the Tk version number skips from 4.2 to 8.0. The jump was made in order to synchronize the Tcl and Tk version numbers.

INSTALL WARNING

If the binary packages for this are installed after any packages for Tk4.2, This installation will overwrite

• The man pages
• The Header files

To avoid these problems if you have tk4.2 installed, you should copy the tcl header files and man pages for Tk4.2 to somehere other than the default /usr/local{include, man} locations before installing Tk8.0

Summary of changes from tk4.2

Here is a list of the most important new features in Tk 8.0. The release also includes several smaller feature changes and bug fixes. See the "changes" file for a complete list of all changes.

1. Native look and feel. The widgets have been rewritten to provide (nearly?) native look and feel on the Macintosh and PC. Many widgets, including scrollbars, menus, and the button family, are implemented with native platform widgets. Others, such as entries and texts, have been modified to emulate native look and feel. These changes are backwards compatible except that (a) some configuration options are now ignored on some platforms and (b) you must use the new menu mechanism described below to native look and feel for menus.
2. There is a new interface for creating menus, where a menubar is implemented as a menu widget instead of a frame containing menubuttons. The -menu option for a toplevel is used to specify the name of the menubar; the menu will be displayed *outside* the toplevel using different mechanisms on each platform (e.g. on the Macintosh the menu will appear at the top of the screen). See the menu demos in the widget demo for examples. The old style of menu still works, but does not provide native look and feel. Menus have several new features:
   • New "-columnbreak" and "-hideMargin" options make it possible to create multi-column menus.
   • It is now possible to manipulate the Apple and Help menus on the Macintosh, and the system menu on Windows. It is also possible to have a right justified Help menu on Unix.
   • Menus now issue the virtual event <> whenever the current item changes. Applications can use this to generate help messages.
   • There is a new "-direction" option for menubuttons, which controls where the menu pops up revenues to the button.
3. The font mechanism in Tk has been completely reworked:
   • Font names need not be nasty X LFDs: more intuitive names like {Times 12 Bold} can also be used. See the manual entry font.n for details.
   • Font requests always succeed now. If the requested font is not available, Tk finds the closest available font and uses that one.
   • Tk now supports named fonts whose precise attributes can be changed dynamically. If a named font is changed, any widget using that font updates itself to reflect the change.
   • There is a new command "font" for creating named fonts and querying various information about fonts.
   • There are now officially supported C APIs for measuring and displaying text. If you use these APIs now, your code will automatically handle international text when internationalization is added to Tk in a future release. See the manual entries MeasureChar.3, TextLayout.3, and FontId.3.
   • The old C procedures Tk_GetFontStruct, Tk_NameOfFontStruct, and Tk_FreeFontStruct have been replaced with more portable procedures Tk_GetFont, Tk_NameOfFont, and Tk_FreeFont.
4. Application embedding. It is now possible to embedded one Tcl/Tk application inside another, using the -container option on frame widgets and the -use option for toplevel widgets or on the command line for wish. Embedding should be fully functional under Unix, but the implementation is incomplete on the Macintosh and PC.
5. Tk now works correctly with Safe-Tcl: it can be loaded into safe interpreters.
6. Text widgets now allow images to be embedded directly in the text without using embedded windows. This is more efficient and provides smoother scrolling.
7. Buttons have a new -default option for drawing default rings in a platform-specific manner.
8. There is a new "gray75" bitmap, and the "gray25" bitmap is now really 25% on (due to an ancient mistake, it had been only 12% on). The Macintosh now supports native bitmaps, including new builtin bitmaps "stop", "caution", and "note", plus the ability to use bitmaps in the application's resource fork.
9. The "destroy" command now ignores windows that don't exist instead of generating an error.

1. Font specifications such as "Times 12" now interpret the size as points, whereas it used to be pixels (this was actually a bug, since the behavior was documented as points). To get pixels now, use a negative size such as "Times -12".
2. The -transient option for menus is no longer supported. You can achieve the same effect with the -type field.
3. In the canvas "coords" command, polygons now return only the points that were explicitly specified when the polygon was created (they used to return an extra point if the polygon wasn't originally closed). Internally, polygons are still closed automatically for purposes of display and hit detection; the extra point just isn't returned by the "coords" command.
4. The photo image mechanism now uses Tcl_Channels instead of FILEs, in order to make it portable. FILEs are no longer used anywhere in Tk.
5. The procedures Tk_GetFontStruct, Tk_NameOfFontStruct, and Tk_FreeFontStruct have been removed.

Note: the new compiler in Tcl 8.0 may also affect Tcl/Tk scripts; check the Tcl documentation for information on incompatibilities introduced by Tcl 8.0.

Info resources

• Sunscript Information
• Tcl/Tk Unofficial Patch Archive
• Other Information resources are as for Tcl.