Author:         Vince Darley <vincentdarley@users.sourceforge.net>
State:          Final
Type:           Project
Vote:           Done
Created:        27-Sep-2001
Post-History:   
Tcl-Version:    8.4

Abstract

This TIP adds to menu entries the ability to display both textual labels and images (or bitmaps) in exactly the same way as buttons and menubuttons currently can, by adding a -compound option.

Rationale

Menu entries are very similar to labels in most respects, but they currently lack the ability to show an image and a piece of text at the same time. It is a useful piece of functionality currently missing from Tk (certainly many standard applications make use of such menu entries, e.g. Internet Explorer). The changes involved are relatively small.

A very similar TIP [11] was accepted without much argument.

Proposal

This TIP implements the change by adding an additional option -compound to menu entries which behaves identically to Tk's existing -compound option: it accepts the values none, center, left, right, top, and bottom, and controls the relative placement of an image to the text label in the entry.

A reference implementation exists, and is available from: ftp://ftp.ucsd.edu/pub/alpha/tcl/compoundmenu.diff (note this diff has Windows-style line endings). This implementation is known to work on Windows and Unix, and since the changes are very, very similar on MacOS I expect it to work there (except perhaps for simple editing mistakes).

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.