Tk is a Graphical User Interface ToolKit.

Copyright (c) 1995-2004 Nick Ing-Simmons. All rights reserved.
This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, with the exception
of all the files in the pTk sub-directory which have separate terms
derived from those of the orignal Tix4.1.3 or Tk8.4.* sources.
See doc/license.html for details of this license.

Tk804.027 is now considered production worthy.
(Previous stable release being Tk800.025.)

This a re-port of a perl interface to Tk8.4.
C code is derived from Tcl/Tk8.4.5.
It also includes all the C code parts of Tix8.1.4 from SourceForge.
The perl code corresponding to Tix's Tcl code is not fully implemented.

Perl API is essentially the same as Tk800 series Tk800.025 but has not
been verified as compliant. There ARE differences see pod/804delta.pod.

The goal of this release is Unicode support via perl's and
core-tk's use of UTF-8.
Tk804.027 builds and loads into a threaded perl but is NOT
yet thread safe.

This Tk804 is only likely to work with perl5.8.0 or later.
Perl's UTF-8 support has improved since it was introduced in perl5.6.0.
Some functions (regular expression match in Text widgets) are known
to only work with perl5.8.1 and later

There are a lot more tests in Tk804. Some notably t/entry.t and
t/listbox.t very dependant on the available fonts and to a lesser
extent the window manager used. (See below for a list of fails
which can be "expected" even if nothing is really wrong.)

Others t/JP.t and t/KR.t need oriental fonts and can take a long time to
run on a machine with a lot of fonts but which lacks the glyphs tests are
looking for.

An experimental implementation of client side fonts via
freetype2, fontconfig and Xft is provided for Unix.
This is strongly recommened if you are planning to make use
of Unicode rendering capabilities of Tk. It also gives anti-aliased
fonts for regular text (if you have TrueType or Type1 fonts and
they are in your fontconfig config file).

To try this install do

  perl Makefile.PL XFT=1

See http://fontconfig.org

The author has installed
  http://fontconfig.org/release/xrender-0.8.3.tar.gz
  http://fontconfig.org/release/xft-2.1.2.tar.gz
  http://fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.2.0.tar.gz

but it also works with versions in SuSE8.2 and SuSE9.0.

RedHat 9 builds and runs, but has different fonts installed
so fails the listbox.t and entry.t in a manner which shows
those tests fragility:

Failed Test Stat Wstat Total Fail  Failed  List of Failed
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
t/entry.t                336   12   3.57%  93 152 154 157 160-161 167 201 203
                                           205 207 280
t/listbox.t              437   46  10.53%  89 92-93 95-97 99-101 186 234 237-
                                           241 280 282-284 286 288 301-304 336-
                                           337 339 343 348 365 383-384 386-389
                                           391 393 395-396 399 401 406 432
 (3 subtests UNEXPECTEDLY SUCCEEDED), 35 subtests skipped.
Failed 2/46 test scripts, 95.65% okay. 58/2618 subtests failed, 97.78% okay.

----------------------------

Author has built against:

  Perl5.8.0
   Has Unicode mis-features and is not recommended.
   Author has tested against official perl5.8.0 and
   the version shipped with RedHat 9.0.
   (This latter's perl -V shows it to have MAINT18379 applied as
    a local patch.)

   SuSE's perl5.8.0 was fine, and they now distribute a 5.8.1

   Note that on RedHat Linux in particular the build process may
   need to be done in a non UTF-8 locale i.e. LANG=en_GB
   not LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
   (This is due to bugs in some perl5.8.0's as shipped by RedHat.)

  Perl5.8.1
   Pentium Suse Linux-8.2 gcc-3.3
   Visual C++ 6.0, Windows-XP, dmake/nmake
   Mingw 2.0, Windows-XP, dmake  (perl without PERL_IMP_SYS, that is
   broken for MinGW).
   ActivePerl based on 5.8.1 also works with Visual C++ 6.0/nmake

  Perl5.8.2
   Pentium Suse Linux-8.2/9.0 gcc-3.3
   Visual C++ 6.0, Windows-XP, dmake/nmake

  Perl5.8.3
   Pentium Suse Linux-9.0 gcc-3.3
   Visual C++ 6.0, Windows-XP, dmake/nmake

For questions on this package try news:comp.lang.perl.tk or e-mail
to <ptk@lists.stanford.edu> or <nick@ing-simmons.net>


