TCL(Tool Command Language) Scripting :: tooltips/balloon help on menubar pulldowns


	tooltips/balloon help on menubar pulldowns Following up on my previous query about the Tklib tooltips, I now wonder whether any tooltip/balloonhelp package works on menu items that descend from a menubar? There are at least half-a-dozen tooltip packages. Most of them don't even purport to work on menus. Of those that do, the Tklib tooltip package does work on menu items but not when they descend from a menubar. Bwidgets has a tooltip package called DynamicHelp that claims to work on menu items. It even has an example of menu items descended from a menubar. That example does not work when cut and pasted from the documentation into a file on my Linux system. So, is there any known way to get tooltips on menu items descended from a menubar? billpo@alum.mit.edu writes: > Following up on my previous query about the Tklib tooltips, I now > wonder whether any tooltip/balloonhelp package works on menu items > that descend from a menubar? There are at least half-a-dozen tooltip > packages. Most of them don't even purport to work on menus. Of those > that do, the Tklib tooltip package does work on menu items but not > when they descend from a menubar. Bwidgets has a tooltip package > called DynamicHelp that claims to work on menu items. It even has an > example of menu items descended from a menubar. That example does not > work when cut and pasted from the documentation into a file on my > Linux system. So, is there any known way to get tooltips on menu items > descended from a menubar? Tk::Balloon for Perl/Tk works with menu items, at least on X11 systems. So theoretically it is possible, as the Perl/Tk implementation does not use any Perl specialities for the balloons, as far as I know. Regards, Slaven -- Slaven Rezic - slaven <at> rezic <dot> de babybike - routeplanner for cyclists in Berlin handheld (e.g. Compaq iPAQ with Linux) version of bbbike http://bbbike.sourceforge.net Slaven Rezic wrote: > Tk::Balloon for Perl/Tk works with menu items, at least on X11 > systems. So theoretically it is possible, as the Perl/Tk > implementation does not use any Perl specialities for the balloons, as > far as I know. It's quite possible to associate help with menus (I don't personally like doing it with tooltips, but YMMV) through the <<MenuSelect>> virtual event. However, when you do this it is easiest to avoid using the %W substitution (except in the one case detailed below) and instead put the name of the menu directly in the script (otherwise you get to find out far too much about menu clones!). You will also want to use the 'index' subcommand. To see how these things might fit together, consider the following little script (assuming the menu is called .m): bind .m <<MenuSelect>> {puts "selected [%W index active] in .m"} Note that I used %W here; this is required here or things "won't work" (technically, you need the active item in the clone, not the active item in the source menu). Also note that the active index can be 'none'. :-) Once you've got the info out of the menu at the right time, getting those tooltips up should be a breeze... Donal. On May 20, 11:02 am, "Donal K. Fellows" - Hide quoted text - <donal.k.fell@manchester.ac.uk> wrote: > Slaven Rezic wrote: > > Tk::Balloon for Perl/Tk works with menu items, at least on X11 > > systems. So theoretically it is possible, as the Perl/Tk > > implementation does not use any Perl specialities for the balloons, as > > far as I know. > It's quite possible to associate help with menus (I don't personally > like doing it with tooltips, but YMMV) through the <<MenuSelect>> > virtual event. However, when you do this it is easiest to avoid using > the %W substitution (except in the one case detailed below) and instead > put the name of the menu directly in the script (otherwise you get to > find out far too much about menu clones!). You will also want to use the > 'index' subcommand. To see how these things might fit together, consider > the following little script (assuming the menu is called .m): > bind .m <<MenuSelect>> {puts "selected [%W index active] in .m"} > Note that I used %W here; this is required here or things "won't work" > (technically, you need the active item in the clone, not the active item > in the source menu). Also note that the active index can be 'none'. :-) > Once you've got the info out of the menu at the right time, getting > those tooltips up should be a breeze... > Donal. Thanks, although the provision of info as to how to do it suggests that the existing packages that claim to do it really don't. I agree that in general tooltips on menus are not the best idea, but I have a particular case in which I think it would be useful. Bill Poser wrote: > Thanks, although the provision of info as to how to do it suggests > that the existing packages that claim to do it really don't. I've no idea if they do or not. I just jumped in with the info in case they didn't. Back when I was writing serious GUIs, there weren't that any tooltip packages that looked halfway decent, let alone as good as I wanted; hopefully things have improved since then, but I've not checked for years. :-) Donal. On May 20, 2:13 pm, "Donal K. Fellows" <donal.k.fell@man.ac.uk> wrote: > Bill Poser wrote: > > Thanks, although the provision of info as to how to do it suggests > > that the existing packages that claim to do it really don't. > I've no idea if they do or not. I just jumped in with the info in case > they didn't. Back when I was writing serious GUIs, there weren't that > any tooltip packages that looked halfway decent, let alone as good as > I wanted; hopefully things have improved since then, but I've not > checked for years. :-) > Donal. There seem to be half-a-dozen or so tooltip packages, most of them rather ad hoc. Most don't even attempt to handle menus, canvas or text widgets. I have mostly my slightly modified version of the code in Effective Tcl. That is pretty good, but doesn't try to handle menus. Bwidgets has something called DynamicHelp, which purports to handle menus, including menus descending from a menubar. The man page actually includes code for the specific case in which I am interested, but it doesn't work. The other package that I have used is Jeff Hobbs' tooltip package from Tklib. This is one of the nicer packages, with nice-looking balloons and a number of parameters controllable. It works on menus that do not descend from a menubar but not on those that do. Overall, the situation isn't too bad, but it would be nice to have a package that allowed a few more options to be set and allowed tooltips to be found to anything one could reasonably image binding them to. For my immmediate purpose, I think will just use a pseudo-menu, with a bunch of regular buttons gridded onto a toplevel. > There seem to be half-a-dozen or so tooltip packages, most of them > rather ad hoc. Most don't even attempt to handle menus, canvas or text > widgets. I have mostly my slightly modified version of the code in > Effective Tcl. That is pretty good, but doesn't try to handle menus. > Bwidgets has something called DynamicHelp, which purports to handle > menus, including menus descending from a menubar. The man page > actually includes code for the specific case in which I am interested, > but it doesn't work. That manpage also says the following: "For menu, balloon type help is not available." Indeed, dynamic help for a menu is normally displayed in an application's statusbar, not as a balloon-type tooltip. The example you are referring too contains the following lines: # create label for help, using variable varinfo label .l -textvariable varinfo The intent is that you pack this label into the statusbar of your application. --Koen On May 21, 2:47 am, Koen Danckaert <danck@retarget.com> wrote: - Hide quoted text - > > There seem to be half-a-dozen or so tooltip packages, most of them > > rather ad hoc. Most don't even attempt to handle menus, canvas or text > > widgets. I have mostly my slightly modified version of the code in > > Effective Tcl. That is pretty good, but doesn't try to handle menus. > > Bwidgets has something called DynamicHelp, which purports to handle > > menus, including menus descending from a menubar. The man page > > actually includes code for the specific case in which I am interested, > > but it doesn't work. > That manpage also says the following: "For menu, balloon type help is not available." Indeed, dynamic help for a menu is normally displayed in an application's statusbar, not as a balloon-type tooltip. The example you are referring too contains the following lines: > # create label for help, using variable varinfo > label .l -textvariable varinfo > The intent is that you pack this label into the statusbar of your application. > --Koen Unfortunately, the manual page for DynamicHelp is screwed up. The additional information that you cite is provided only under the "register" subcommand, which is deprecated, not under the current "add" subcommand where it belongs. In any case, DynamicHelp is yet another instance of a package that does not provide tooltips for menus. Hi Bill, FYI the reason Jeff's tooltips don't appear to work (on Windows at least) is that the package receives the wrong coordinates. In fact, the tooltip appears: Just have a look at the top left corner of - no, not your application, but your screen. For the menu relative coordinates are reported while the package expects absolute coords (which works with all other widgets). AFAIK there is no easy way out - there just isn't an interface to query a menu for its position - let alone its width, which would be equally important in order to know just where to place the tooltip. Best regards Helmut Giese Helmut Giese wrote: > AFAIK there is no easy way out - there just isn't an interface to > query a menu for its position - let alone its width, which would be > equally important in order to know just where to place the tooltip. Yes there is ([winfo] works with menus) but you need to work with the clone and not the master. Donal. On Mon, 21 May 2007 15:42:26 +0100, "Donal K. Fellows" <donal.k.fell@manchester.ac.uk> wrote: >Helmut Giese wrote: >> AFAIK there is no easy way out - there just isn't an interface to >> query a menu for its position - let alone its width, which would be >> equally important in order to know just where to place the tooltip. >Yes there is ([winfo] works with menus) but you need to work with the >clone and not the master. Hi Donal., I always learn something new here, thanks. The clones, I suppose, are these terribly looking .#mnu.#mnu#file, .#mnu.#mnu#edit thingies? Best regards Helmut Giese billpo@alum.mit.edu wrote: > Following up on my previous query about the Tklib tooltips, I now > wonder whether any tooltip/balloonhelp package works on menu items > that descend from a menubar? There are at least half-a-dozen tooltip > packages. Most of them don't even purport to work on menus. Of those > that do, the Tklib tooltip package does work on menu items but not > when they descend from a menubar. Bwidgets has a tooltip package > called DynamicHelp that claims to work on menu items. It even has an > example of menu items descended from a menubar. That example does not > work when cut and pasted from the documentation into a file on my > Linux system. So, is there any known way to get tooltips on menu items > descended from a menubar? Just out of curiosity, why do you want to do this? It strikes me as something that would present serious usability problems. I'm envisioning a case in which I've pulled down a menu and have selected the menu item, and then all of a sudden a tooltip pops up, grabbing focus away from the menu item I've selected. I can't imagine this being anything but jarring and annoying, and I'm not aware of best GUI design practices on any platform that recommend this. I'm basing this assertion on what I've seen some programs do with entry fields, popping up a tooltip when the mouse hovers over the entry field; if I'm trying to select the field to begin entering text, this is highly distracting. Kevin Walzer wrote: > Just out of curiosity, why do you want to do this? It strikes me as > something that would present serious usability problems. I'm envisioning > a case in which I've pulled down a menu and have selected the menu item, > and then all of a sudden a tooltip pops up, grabbing focus away from the > menu item I've selected. I can't imagine this being anything but jarring > and annoying, and I'm not aware of best GUI design practices on any > platform that recommend this. (not speaking for the original author; just tossing my 2 cents into the ring) Tooltips don't always have to pop up in a floating window. Some will argue that as you mouse over a menu item it's a good idea to have a long description of that item appear down in the statusbar. Personally I tend to waffle back and forth on the issue. You can point at it and say "gee, isn't that neat?" but I'm not convinced it truly makes the program any easier to use. When you're focused on a menu it's easy to miss text flashing in a statusbar several inches (cm, whatever) below your line of sight. -- Bryan Oakley http://www.tclscripting.com On May 21, 11:53 am, Kevin Walzer <k@codebykevin.com> wrote: - Hide quoted text - > billpo@alum.mit.edu wrote: > > Following up on my previous query about the Tklib tooltips, I now > > wonder whether any tooltip/balloonhelp package works on menu items > > that descend from a menubar? There are at least half-a-dozen tooltip > > packages. Most of them don't even purport to work on menus. Of those > > that do, the Tklib tooltip package does work on menu items but not > > when they descend from a menubar. Bwidgets has a tooltip package > > called DynamicHelp that claims to work on menu items. It even has an > > example of menu items descended from a menubar. That example does not > > work when cut and pasted from the documentation into a file on my > > Linux system. So, is there any known way to get tooltips on menu items > > descended from a menubar? > Just out of curiosity, why do you want to do this? It strikes me as > something that would present serious usability problems. I'm envisioning > a case in which I've pulled down a menu and have selected the menu item, > and then all of a sudden a tooltip pops up, grabbing focus away from the > menu item I've selected. I can't imagine this being anything but jarring > and annoying, and I'm not aware of best GUI design practices on any > platform that recommend this. > I'm basing this assertion on what I've seen some programs do with entry > fields, popping up a tooltip when the mouse hovers over the entry field; > if I'm trying to select the field to begin entering text, this is highly > distracting. Well, I can't say that I've seen this in any UI guidelines, but the specific case I had in mind is that of a menu of available encodings. The point here is that users may need to read or write data in an encoding other than UTF-8, but even those like myself with a particular interest in character encodings do not know every encoding by number. It seemed, therefore, that it might be useful to have tooltips that tell you, e.g., that tis-620 is the Thai national standard. I don't think that the tooltips grab focus. To me, at least, they aren't jarring. Here's a demo. Give it a try and see what you think. Bill ---- package require tooltip proc AssignEncoding {x e} { set ::Pars($x) $e destroy .encm } set EncodingInfo(ascii) "The usual Roman encoding used in the United States and other English-speaking countries." set EncodingInfo(big5) "A 2-byte encoding used in Taiwan and Hong Kong for traditional Chinese characters." set EncodingInfo(cp437) "This is the original encoding of the IBM PC." set EncodingInfo(cp737) "An IBM PC encoding for the Greek alphabet." set EncodingInfo(cp775) "MS DOS 8-bit encoding for Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian" set EncodingInfo(cp850) "MS DOS Multilingual Latin I" set EncodingInfo(cp852) "MS DOS Central European (Czech, Polish, Rumanian, Slovak)" set EncodingInfo(cp855) "A rarely used MS DOS encoding of Cyrillic" set EncodingInfo(cp857) "MS DOS Turkish" set EncodingInfo(cp860) "MS DOS Portuguese" set EncodingInfo(cp861) "MS DOS Icelandic/Nordic" set EncodingInfo(cp862) "MS DOS Hebrew" set EncodingInfo(cp863) "MS DOS Canadian French" set EncodingInfo(cp864) "MS DOS Arabic" set EncodingInfo(cp865) "MS DOS Nordic" set EncodingInfo(cp866) "MS DOS Cyrillic" set EncodingInfo(cp869) "MS DOS Modern Greek" set EncodingInfo(cp874) "MS Windows Thai" set EncodingInfo(cp932) "An MS Windows extension of Shift JIS for Japanese" set EncodingInfo(cp936) "An MS Windows version of the GBK encoding of Chinese" set EncodingInfo(cp949) "An MS Windows encoding for Korean Hangul similar to EUC-KR." set EncodingInfo(cp950) "The Microsoft version of the Big5 encoding of traditional Chinese" set EnDcodingInfo(cp1250) "MS Windows Latin 2" set EncodingInfo(cp1251) "MS Windows Cyrillic" set EncodingInfo(cp1252) "MS Windows Latin 1" set EncodingInfo(cp1253) "MS Windows Greek" set EtncodingInfo(cp1254) "MS Windows Turkish" set EncodingInfo(cp1255) "MS Windows Hebrew" set EncodingInfo(cp1256) "MS Windows Arabic" set EncodingInfo(cp1257) "MS Windows Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian" set EncodingInfo(cp1258) "MS Windows Vietnamese" set EncodingInfo(dingbats) "Dingbats" set EncodingInfo(ebcdic) "IBM's 8-bit encoding for American English" set EncodingInfo(euc-cn) "The version of the Extended Unix Code multibyte encoding used for simplified Chinese." set EncodingInfo(euc-jp) "The version of the Extended Unix Code multibyte encoding used for Japanese " set EncodingInfo(euc-kr) "The version of the Extended Unix Code multibyte encoding used for Korean" set EncodingInfo(gb1988) "A two-byte Chinese encoding." set EncodingInfo(gb2312) "This is the principal character set used by the\nPeople's Republic of China\nencoded as EUC-CN." set EncodingInfo(gb2312-raw) "This is the principal character set used by the\nPeople's Republic of China.\nThis is the version without further encoding as EUC-CN." set EncodingInfo(gb12345) "An expansion of GB2312 for Chinese." set EncodingInfo(identity) "The identity mapping. Maps everything onto itself." set EncodingInfo(iso2022) "A multibyte encoding for Chinese." set EncodingInfo(iso2022-jp) "A multibyte encoding for Japanese." set EncodingInfo(iso2022-kr) "A multibyte encoding for Korean." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-1) "This is the ASCII extension known as Latin-1,\nused for most Western European languages." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-2) "This is an ASCII extension used for Eastern European languages." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-3) "This is an ASCII extension used for Esperanto and Maltese." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-4) "This is an ASCII extension used for Northern European languages." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-5) "This is an ASCII extension used for Cyrillic." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-6) "This is an ASCII extension used for Arabic." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-7) "This is an ASCII extension used for Greek." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-8) "This is an ASCII extension used for Hebrew." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-9) "This is an ASCII extension used for Turkish." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-10) "This is an ASCII extension used for Nordic languages." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-11) "This is an ASCII extension used for Thai." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-13) "This is an ASCII extension used for languages of the Baltic Rim." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-14) "This is the ASCII extension used primarily for Celtic languages." set EncodingInfo(iso8859-16) "This is the ASCII extension used primarily South-Eastern European langauges." set EncodingInfo(jis0201) "An eight-bit Japanese encoding containing roughly speaking ASCII plus kana" set EncodingInfo(jis0208) "A two-byte Japanese encoding containing 6355 kanji plus\nkana, roman letters, Greek, adn Cyrillic" set EncodingInfo(jis0212) "This is a supplementary set of characters for Japanese" set EncodingInfo(koi8-r) "Russian Cyrillic" set EncodingInfo(koi8-u) "Ukrainian Cyrillic" set EncodingInfo(ksc5601) "A double-byte encoding for the Korean writing system, described in RFC1557." set EncodingInfo(macCentEuro) "Macintosh Central European" set EncodingInfo(macCroatian) "Macintosh Croatian" set EncodingInfo(macCyrillic) "Macintosh Cyrillic" set EncodingInfo(macDingbats) "Macintosh Dingbats" set EncodingInfo(macGreek) "Macintosh Greek" set EncodingInfo(macIceland) "Macintosh Icelandic" set EncodingInfo(macJapan) "Macintosh Japanese" set EncodingInfo(macRoman) "Macintosh Roman" set EncodingInfo(macRomania) "Macintosh Romanian" set EncodingInfo(macThai) "Macintosh Thai" set EncodingInfo(macTurkish) "Macintosh Turkish" set EncodingInfo(macUkraine) "Macintosh Ukrainian" set EncodingInfo(pascii) "The Perso-Arabic Standard for Computer Information Interchange. This is the Indian government 8-bit encoding for the languages written in Arabic letters: Arabic, Kashmiri, Persian, Sindhi, and Urdu. It is the Arabic script counterpart to ISCII." set EncodingInfo(shiftjis) "A two-byte encoding for the Japanese writing system standardized as JIS 0208." set EncodingInfo(symbol) "Adobe Symbol font encoding" set EncodingInfo(tis-620) "This is the Thai national standard 8-bit encoding." set EncodingInfo(ucs-2be) "This is a two-byte encoding of the Basic Monolingual Plane of Unicode, with the two bytes in big-endian order." set EncodingInfo(unicode) "This is a synonym for UCS-2, the two-byte encoding of the\nBasic Monolingual Plane of Unicode" set EncodingInfo(utf-8) "The UTF-8 variable length encoding for Unicode." #Subtract list b from a proc SubtractList {a b} { array set tmp {} foreach x $a { set tmp($x) "" } foreach y $b { if {[info exists tmp($y)]} { unset tmp($y) } } return [array names tmp] } proc PopupSelectEncoding {x} { set xp 2 set yp 2 if {[winfo exists .encm]} { raise .encm return } set w [toplevel .encm] wm title $w "Select encoding" set wf [frame $w.f -border 2 -relief flat -bg salmon] pack $wf .encm configure -bg salmon set EncodingList [lsort -dictionary [SubtractList [encoding names] [list identity X11ControlChars]]] set EncodingCnt [llength $EncodingList] set PerRow [expr int(0.7 * ceil(sqrt($EncodingCnt)))] set Rows [expr ceil(double($EncodingCnt)/double($PerRow))] set Total [expr $PerRow * $Rows] for {set k 0} {$k < $Total} {incr k} { set row [expr $k/$PerRow] set col [expr $k%$PerRow] set c $wf.r${row}c${col} if {$k < $EncodingCnt} { set Encoding [lindex $EncodingList $k] button $c -text $Encoding \ -padx $xp -pady $yp -command "AssignEncoding $x $Encoding" if {[info exists ::EncodingInfo($Encoding)]} { ::tooltip::tooltip $c $::EncodingInfo($Encoding) } } else { label $c } set LastRow $row; set LastCol $col; } #Lay the buttons and labels out in a grid. for {set row 0} {$row <= $LastRow} {incr row} { set line [list]; for {set ... read more » On May 21, 12:22 pm, Bryan Oakley <oak@bardo.clearlight.com> wrote: - Hide quoted text - > Kevin Walzer wrote: > > Just out of curiosity, why do you want to do this? It strikes me as > > something that would present serious usability problems. I'm envisioning > > a case in which I've pulled down a menu and have selected the menu item, > > and then all of a sudden a tooltip pops up, grabbing focus away from the > > menu item I've selected. I can't imagine this being anything but jarring > > and annoying, and I'm not aware of best GUI design practices on any > > platform that recommend this. > (not speaking for the original author; just tossing my 2 cents into the > ring) > Tooltips don't always have to pop up in a floating window. Some will > argue that as you mouse over a menu item it's a good idea to have a long > description of that item appear down in the statusbar. > Personally I tend to waffle back and forth on the issue. You can point > at it and say "gee, isn't that neat?" but I'm not convinced it truly > makes the program any easier to use. When you're focused on a menu it's > easy to miss text flashing in a statusbar several inches (cm, whatever) > below your line of sight. > -- > Bryan Oakleyhttp://www.tclscripting.com There is one other situation in which I have used tooltips over menu items of a sort, namely with character entry charts. The tooltips gloss the characters. This is very useful when you need to enter characters in a writing system you don't know well or where you can't read the letters on the display very well. Have a look at my character entry toolkit: http://billposer.org/Software/CharEntry.html. Helmut Giese wrote: > The clones, I suppose, are these terribly looking > .#mnu.#mnu#file, .#mnu.#mnu#edit > thingies? Yes. Normally you can safely ignore them. But when you're working with <<MenuSelect>> you do need to know because you're working with parts of the menu state that aren't shared between clones and their master. Donal.