Tix and Tix Widgets

 

http://tix.sourceforge.net Tix (the Tk Interface eXtension) is an enhanced version of Tcl/Tk; in particular, it replaces Tcl/Tk's rustic default looks by something a bit more modern, and it has a lot more widgets built in.

To use tix, you pass the compiled program the command line option -uni-wish=tixwish (where tixwish is the name of Tix' wish; try which tixwish at the command line, and if that says command not found in whatever language your shell is configured to talk to you to, you are out of luck I am afraid.) Thus, the source code does not change; Tix is a conservative extension of Tcl/Tk.

To find out whether the HTKprogram is currently running under a Tix wish, use the function isTixAvailable:: IO Bool; a return value True indicates Tix.

Here is an overview over the Tix widgets encapsulated by HTK:

• The class HasTooltip, instantiated by all widgets, allows tooltips: text which is attached to the widget, and appears in a wee yellow box if the mouse hovers over the widget for a short while. Personally, I find this sort of thing immensely helpful.
• A paned window is a window divided into vertical or horizontal panes, which can be resized by the user. A well-known example of this is Netscape's mail interface, or Adobe's acrobat reader, where you can change the size of the pane on the left (the mailboxes or the bookmarks) by grabbing the dividing line and moving it horizontally. For its usage, see PanedWindow.htmlPanedWindow and the example MainPanedWindow.hs in htk/examples/tix.
• A NoteBook.htmlnote book has a number of pages with tabs on top. It displays one page at a time, selected by the tab. The pages are represented by the type NoteBookPage, which is an instance of the Container class, so you can pack widgets into them.
• A LabelFrame.htmlLabelFrame is a frame with a label; useful for grouping information together.
• A ComboBox.htmlcombo box is a combination of an entry and a list box, and as such has a value. Used much like list boxes, but with not quite as versatile selection schemes.

  
Figure 6: Tix Widgets

Fig. 6 shows notebooks, labelled frames and a combo box.

There are many more Tix widgets, but we have found not all of them as immediately useful as the ones above. Feel free to encapsulate more (it should not be too hard). However, if you want to use Tix' tree widgets, consider using the tree list from the toolkit (see below), which is much nicer.