tkinter example - 11 (Message Widget)

The Message Widget used to display short text messages. It can wrap text, and adjust its width to maintain a given aspect ratio. The message widget is similar in its functionality to the Label widget, but it is more flexible in displaying text, e.g. the font can be changed while the Label widget can only display text in a single font. This means that we can choose arbitrarily a font for one widget, but the text of this widget will be rendered solely in this font. This means that we can't change the font within a widget. So it's not possible to have a text in more than one font. If you need to display text in multiple fonts, we suggest to use a Text widget. The Message widget is a variant of the Label, designed to display multi-line messages.

The following program creates a Message widget:

from tkinter import *

master = Tk()
master.title('Albert Einstein says:')

whatever_you_do = "Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value."
msg = Message(master, text = whatever_you_do)
msg.config(bg='lightgreen', font=('times', 24, 'italic'))
msg.pack()

mainloop( )

The output of the program is shown below:




If you don’t specify anything else, the widget attepts to format the text to keep a given aspect ratio. If you don’t want that behaviour, you can specify a width:

Message(master, text = whatever_you_do,width=500)

See the modified program below:

from tkinter import *

master = Tk()
master.title('Albert Einstein says:')

whatever_you_do = "Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value."
msg = Message(master, text = whatever_you_do,width=500)
msg.config(bg='lightgreen', font=('times', 24, 'italic'))
msg.pack()

mainloop( )

The output of the program is shown below:




Some more options which can be used with the Message() function are:

anchor	The position, where the text should be placed in the message widget: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW, or CENTER. The Default is CENTER.
aspect	Aspect ratio, given as the width/height relation in percent. The default is 150, which means that the message will be 50% wider than it is high. Note that if the width is explicitly set, this option is ignored.
background	The background color of the message widget. The default value is system specific.
bg	Short for background.
borderwidth	Border width. Default value is 2.
bd	Short for borderwidth.
cursor	Defines the kind of cursor to show when the mouse is moved over the message widget. By default the standard cursor is used.
font	Message font. The default value is system specific.
foreground	Text color. The default value is system specific.
fg	Same as foreground.
highlightbackground	Together with highlightcolor and highlightthickness, this option controls how to draw the highlight region.
highlightcolor	See highlightbackground.
highlightthickness	See highlightbackground.
justify	Defines how to align multiple lines of text. Use LEFT, RIGHT, or CENTER. Note that to position the text inside the widget, use the anchor option. Default is LEFT.
padx	Horizontal padding. Default is -1 (no padding).
pady	Vertical padding. Default is -1 (no padding).
relief	Border decoration. The default is FLAT. Other possible values are SUNKEN, RAISED, GROOVE, and RIDGE.
takefocus	If true, the widget accepts input focus. The default is false.
text	Message text. The widget inserts line breaks if necessary to get the requested aspect ratio. (text/Text)
textvariable	Associates a Tkinter variable with the message, which is usually a StringVar. If the variable is changed, the message text is updated.
width	Widget width given in character units. A suitable width based on the aspect setting is automatically chosen, if this option is not given.

This was a brief introduction about Message widget. Try to use the other options shown above in your programs to understand their functionality. I'll end this post now and till we meet next, keep learning and practicing Python as Python is easy to learn!