July 9, 1996

TCL Synopsis

pad [pathName [options]]

The pad command creates a new window (given by the pathName argument) and makes it into a Pad++ widget. If no pathName is specified, a unique top-level window name will be generated. Additional options may be specified on the command line or in the option database to configure aspects of the Pad++. The pad command returns the name of the created window. At the time this command is invoked, there must not exist a window named pathName, but pathName's parent must exist.

Once a Pad++ widget is created, there are five ways of writing Tcl code for it. They are:

• Configuring the widget: Each widget has several configuration options that control the widget as a whole. For example, -width and -height control the geometry of the widget.

• Executing widget commands: There are many commands associated with the widget. They are actually sub-commands of the primary widget command. When a new pad widget is created, a command is also created whose name is the name of the widget. For instance, evaluating pad .pad creates a widget named .pad, and a command named .pad. For example, to find out what the current view on the pad widget is, use the getview command with: .pad getview.

• Creating items on the widget: Each pad widget can contain many graphical items, such as lines, text, etc. These are all created with the create sub-command. For example, .pad create line 0 0 10 10 creates a line from the origin to the point (10, 10).

• Configuring those items: Once items have been created, they can be modified with the itemconfigure sub-command. For example, supposing that the previous line had an id of 2, we could change its pen color and width with: .pad itemconfigure 2 -pen red -penwidth 5

• Accessing global Pad variables: The pad widget declares certain global Tcl variables that can be used by applications. For example, to see the current version of Pad++, examine the Pad_Version variable.

This version of Pad++ works only with Tcl7.5/Tk4.1.

Note that in this reference manual, optional parameters are listed in square brackets, [...]. While this is traditional for reference documentation, the Tcl/Tk documentation uses ?...? to denote optional parameters in order to avoid confusion with the meaning of [...] in the Tcl language. We decided to risk the confusion with Tcl for the increased clarity of square brackets.

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