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]
}