Tom Krehbiel

Send mailto: krehbiel.tom at gmail dot com

I am a software developer that was originally educated as an electrical engineer. I have held a varity of jobs other than software developer including semiconductor circuit designer, semiconductor device engineer, developer & manager of CIM systems manager and parametric testing manager. Before the UNIX revolution in the '80s I developed software on IBM mainframes, DEC mini's and Zerox time share systems. At that time I mostly programmed in Fortran but in the late '80s I switch to C as UNIX systems became more prevalent. Graphical user interfaces have always been a special interest of mine. This started when I wrote a menuing systems for a VT100 terminal and has progressed from using Dialog on Apollo systems, then to Xt,Motif, and to UIMX, and finally to Tcl/Tk.

The following are notes on Tclkit/Starkit/Starpack and related subjects. I am gathering notes here and if a note survives and grows it will eventually be moved to its own page.

Using the local mode Wiki::init command

To use a Wikit as a help system for an application you need to do a Wiki::init command. The command has the following syntax

 Wiki::init <db-path> [<R/W-flag>] [<tk-path>] [<page>]

Where:

 <db-path>   - path to .tkd database
 <R/W-flag>  - 1=readonly; 0=readwrite; default is readonly
 <tk-path>   - path to top leve tk window; default is ""
 <page>      - title of page to be displayed; default is ""

How to indent an image on a Wikit page

To indent an image on a Wikit page, preceed the image reference with some number of double qouted blanks.

 Example:

 ''     ''[http://myImage.gif]

How to access a Wikit page using its id number

If you need to view a wikit page and you only know its id number, then you can enter the page id surrounded by angle brackets (e.g. '[45]') into the search field. The search engine will report something like:

 Searched for "45" (in page titles):

No matches found

But the "45" in the above message is a link so you can just click on it to go to the page with an id number of 45.

tomk

How to check versions of tclkit

The way to check versions of tclkit is:

 puts $vfs::tclkit_version

Fetching up-to-date copy of Tclers' Wiki

JCW reports that you can always fetch up-to-date copy of the Tclers' Wiki at http://mini.net/cgi-bin/wikit.gz
AMG: This is now a 404. What is the current link?
AK: rsync://wiki.tcl.tk/wiki/wikit.tkd
SRIV: rsync rsync://wiki.tcl.tk/wiki/wikit.sqlite .

Using the Img extention

 package require Img
 proc capture { win } {return [image create photo -format window -data $win]}
 set top .t
 toplevel $top
 frame $top.f
 pack  $top.f -fill both -expand 1
 label $top.f.hello -text "Hello World"
 pack  $top.f.hello -s top -e 0 -f none -padx 10 -pady 10
 update
 set image_1 [capture $top]
 set image_2 [image create photo -format window]
 ${image_2} copy ${image_1} -from 50 0 100 40 -to 0 0 60 40
 set c [canvas .c -background black -height 100 -width 100 ]
 pack $c
 set l [label .c.l -background white -image ${image_2} ]
 pack $l
 $c create window 50 50 -window $l
 update

GUI Debugging

GUI code can be difficult to debug because procedures are executed through callbacks. I use the Pstack package to help me trace down problems in my GUI code.

Microsoft .chm Help Format

Character Class definitions

If you need to know what characters are in one of the classes defined by the "string is <class>" command then take a look at the string class page.

Tcom examples for Microsoft Excel

Examples of how to use the Tcom package to access Microsoft Excel documents can be found at Tcom examples for Microsoft Excel.

SOAP - hello world

The SOAP - hello world example (courtesy of John Seal) is a good starting point for learning how to use tcl SOAP.

StarTool

StarTool is a software reengineering tool that was developed by the UCSD Computer Science Department and is based on Star Diagrams.

Analog Count Down Clock

After watching a Space Shuttle launch I decide I had to have a count down clock. The Starting from the An analog clock in Tk code I wrote Analog Count Down Clock which includes spinboxs to set the time and buttons to start, pause, continue and reset.

Tile

I received the following advice from Pat Thoyts on TkChat concerning how to load tile into version 8.5 for use with code written for version 8.4.

 I have the following in tkchat.tcl for back compat:
 # tile to ttk compatability
 interp alias {} ::ttk::style {} ::style
 interp alias {} ::ttk::setTheme {} ::tile::setTheme
 interp alias {} ::ttk::themes {} ::tile::availableThemes
 interp alias {} ::ttk::LoadImages {} ::tile::LoadImages

Category Person