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Gestalt Items |
Copyright © 2008, 2009 Arndt Roger Schneider
Gestalt Items are a collection of composite windows written in Tcl/Tk. These composite windows are called templates inside of this book.
The deployed template mechanism originates from the Runtime Library. The Rtl_gridwin is the only Runtime Library template directly used inside the Gestalt Items. The Rtl_gridwin is embedded inside the Gistbox and Galette templates.
The two toolbars. Goolbar implemented in Tk Canvas and / or TkPath.
And Zoolbar, a toolbar implemented with TkZinc 3.3.6.
The interface of both toolbars resemble the Tk Menu interface, except: Every item is explicitly named –toolbar items are predeterministic . Menu entries–in contrast to toolbar items– feature an implicit naming convention.
# Implicit naming convention # inside of menus: menu .m set mID [.m add command ...] debug stdout "Menu Item $mID," debug stdout "...implicit created by: ».m«."
# Explicit naming convention # inside of toolbars: goolbar .t set tID [.t add command myItem ...] debug stdout "Toolbar Item $tID is »myItem«."
Palette window. The Galette is a Goolbar variation. The Galette arranges toolbar items in multiple lines and features attached scrollbars.
The Galette works somewhat akin to the »-columnbreak« property inside of Tk menus.
Toolbar customization. The Gooleditor –an embedded dialog– is used to customize palettes or toolbars interactively. The Gooleditor is implemented through the Goolbar, but Zoolbars can be customized with it, too.
Gstripes, the second big piece inside this book, is a single template. Gstripes primary goal is to create and manage white space, Gstripes provides no functionality of its own.
Gstripes uses existing controls and changes their visual representation in respect to the surrounding white space created by Gstripes. The mechanism is called »hijacking« inside this book.
A hijacked controls gains –through Gstripes– the ability to interact with white space . Such controls can fade into white space or even interactively change their shape...
Gstripes is also present inside of other Gestalt Items templates.
The white space, created through Gstripes, may contain any graphical object from Tk Canvas and TkPath. The background is thus not restricted to textures. For example: a radial gradient may run through an entire dialog, including the toolbar–Goolbar– on top and the elements inside the dialog.
Gstripes turns a conventional Tk Graphical User Interface into a sophisticated vector graphics. This graphics is convertible into Scalable Vector Graphics and later PDF. It is even possible to print an entire Tk Graphical User Interface, with the printer’s resolution instead of the display resolution –as is common for Tk today– through FOP. This book contains such Scalable Vector Graphicss.
The remainder, of this book, is dedicated to the Gistbox , another listbox template.
The static property -listtype is used to tell Gistbox which listbox type to use. This is the same mechanism used by Rtl_combobox and Rtl_mlistbox respectively.