Skip to main content

Recent activity -Scripting...

The past couple of days has seen me gnocl scripting rather than working on core code. One pet project of mine is the automated creation of edocs and ebooks. Althought I have an old version of AbbySoft FineReader Professional which runs on my laptop and an equally ancient version of Acrobat 6 (on my Linux box I have PDF Studio which is brilliant value for money) I want to add docs as I work on my desktop machine. To do this I created a front Tcl/Gnocl front end to control the scanning, clean-up and cropping of scans, the conversion to DJVU with OCR and packing of graphics to a multipage TIF for later processing in AbbySoft FineReader.  Everything works fine but my control script have been hacked to gether over the past year or so and so some rationalisation is in order. But, but, but who likes writing code from scratch all the time! Creating new basic GUIs is always a chore so I thought that I'd create something to the growing gnocl megawidgets package. Todays addition will build a container and add the main control elements for menus, toolbars, the main content area and status block. Names and aliases for these items is returned as a list for future modification. Its still all basic at the moment, but it make life easier. Perhaps I should include this with the next release? Well, here's the proc itself:

#---------------
# Create a boilerplate application window
#---------------
proc gnocl::default {args} {

# set some defaults here
set opts(menubar) ""
set opts(toolbar) ""
set opts(box) ""
set opts(status) ""
 
# apportion values
foreach {arg val} $args {
    switch -- $arg {
        -opt1 -
        -opt2 { append opts(menubar) "$arg $val " }
        -opt3 -
        -opt4 { append opts(toolbar) "$arg $val " }
        -opt5 -
        -opt6 { append opts(box) "$arg $val " }
        -opt7 -
        -opt8 { append opts(status) "$arg $val " }
        default { puts "WARNING: Invalid option $arg."    }
        }
}

# create components
set app(menuBar) [gnocl::menuBar]
set app(toolBar) [gnocl::toolBar]
set app(box) [gnocl::box]
set app(status) [gnocl::statusBar]
set app(container) [gnocl::box -orientation vertical]
 
# assemble
$app(container) add $app(menuBar)
$app(container) add $app(toolBar)
$app(container) add $app(box) -fill {1 1} -expand 1
$app(container) add $app(status)
 
# create menus
# file i/0
# create menus
set app(menu,file) [gnocl::menu]
set app(menu,help) [gnocl::menu]
 
#attach items
$app(menuBar) add [gnocl::menuItem -text "%__File" -submenu $app(menu,file)]
$app(menuBar) add [gnocl::menuItem -text "%__Help" -submenu $app(menu,help)]
 
#add menu sub-items
$app(menu,file) add [gnocl::menuItem -text "%#Quit" -onClicked exit]
$app(menu,help) add [gnocl::menuItem -text "%__About" -onClicked {puts "About Gnocl"}]
 
# create toolbars
$app(toolBar) add item -text "Button1" -onClicked {puts Button1}
$app(toolBar) add space
$app(toolBar) add checkItem -text "Button2" -onToggled {puts Buton2}

#eval "set app(top) [gnocl::window -visible 1 -child $app(container) ]"
#$app(top) center
#eval "$app(top) configure $winArgs"
 
$app(status) push "Ready"
 
# return a list consiting of widget aliases and names
return [array get app]
}

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

gnocl::calendar

Given this module some attention today. Added some of the more package wide options to the module and created customised handler for setting the month. (For some odd reason months are are counted 0-11 whereas days are 1-31.) There's still a little more to do to this one including the addition of code to store diary details. Here's the working test script to show the range of options at work. The percentage substitution string item %e explores something that I've been toying with, the name of the signal/event that initiated the call. Ok, a script can keep its own internal trace but who knows, it might prove useful. #--------------- # calendarTest.tcl #--------------- # Author:   William J Giddings # Date:     07/05/09 #--------------- #!/bin/sh # the next line restarts using tclsh \ exec tclsh "$0" "$@" #--------------- package require Gnocl set cal [gnocl::calendar] $cal configure -day 8 -month 7 -year 1956 $cal configure -rowHeight 1 -colWidth 1 $ca

Simple Runtime Debugging Message Dialog

At times it's useful to see what values variables hold, or offer some pause point before the code goes elsewhere before causing havoc. Its possible to write output to the terminal but this can get lost in copious forms of other outputs, besides, there's no pausing the script execution either. The following proc creates a custom dialog which displays ad message along with the point in the calling script from which it was invoked. ## simple runtime debugging feedback dialog, alternative to console based gnocl::msg # @param msg message to display # @returns none # proc xxx::msg {txt} { set frame [info frame -1] append msg "Message:\n\n" append msg " $txt \n\n\n" append msg "Called from:\n\n" append msg "Proc:\t[lindex [info level -1] 0]\n" append msg "File:\t[file tail [dict get $frame file]]\n" append msg "Line:\t[dict get $frame line]\n" gnocl::dialog \ -type info \ -text $msg

Creating a button box with right aligned widgets

The dialog widget has its own internal functionaluty to create and position buttons at the bottom right corner of the window container. When creating these for ourselves it must be born in mind that default settings for fill and expand are both 0.5. Failing to set these will always place the child objects in the centre, regardless of alignment. For most cases these defaults are acceptable but, to create that dialog-button arrangement, use the following snippet as a model!   # to right align completely, set expand and fill to 0 set hbox [gnocl::hBox] set b1 [gnocl::button -text Select \                -data $lst                 -onClicked { puts DO-SOMETHING-WITH-%d} ] set b2 [gnocl::button -text Cancel -onClicked { puts DONE! } ] $vbox add $hbox -expand 0 -fill 0 -align right $hbox add $b1 $hbox add $b2