Documentation is "in the works": there are several books dealing with perl/Tk in progress, and a growing FAQ (the document you are presently reading).
In the meantime the available information resources can be split into Perl/Tk, Perl, and Tcl/Tk documentation categories:
pod2man
from complaining too much during
make install.)
ftp
at
ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/archives/ (both in the USA). You may
search the contents of the mailing list archives thanks to a cgi-bin
script written by Achim Bohnet in Germany at:
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/ptk/To subscribe to the mailing list you can send mail to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu (i.e. <majordomo@lists.stanford.edu>) with the following command in the body of your e-mail message:
subscribe ptk joe.user@somewhere (Joe D. User)
To send a message to all recipients of the mailing list send e-mail to <ptk@lists.stanford.edu>.
To remove yourself from the mailing list send mail to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu (i.e. <majordomo@lists.stanford.edu>) with the following command in the body of your e-mail message:
unsubscribe ptk joe.user@somewhere (Joe D. User)
perl -e 'print join("\n",@INC),"\n";'If that command does not turn up a perl5/ directory then make sure that you are running perl 5 with the following: perl -v (again this can be entered at the shell prompt).
perl -e 'use Config; print $Config{'man1dir'},"\n",$Config{'man3dir'},"\n"'And if you still cannot find the manual pages check with your system administrator for the proper MANPATH and/or Tk-# installation version.
In your perl5/Tk/ directory there should be
a number of .pod files including (but not limited to)
UserGuide.pod. The files are examples of the perl "plain old
documentation" format and are just about human readable as they
are (e.g. you may more
, cat
, or
less
them; or send them to a printer). They are intended to be
run through a re-formatting program however. Such programs include
pod2man
, pod2html
, and pod2latex
(which get installed when you install perl
) or
pod2text which was written by Tom
Christiansen.
A command line like the following (but subject to local variations)
should work for you:
pod2man perl5/Tk/UserGuide.pod | nroff -man | moreThere should even be a perl script to run the above command for you. It is executed as:
perldoc perl5/Tk/UserGuideNote that if there is pod like documentation in a perl module you may also execute perldoc on it as in:
perldoc ColorEditor.pm(please note that not all .pm mod files have pod embedded.) If you want that GUI look and feel (like xman) make the appropriate changes to the following script:
#!/usr/bin/perl use Tk; use Tk::Pod; my $m = new MainWindow; $m -> Pod(-file => 'Tk/ColorEditor.pm'); MainLoop;Or better still use the tkpod program that gets installed when you 'make install' Tk. It can be used like this:
tkpod /usr/local/lib/perl5/pod/perl
The pod conversion to latex proceeds as you might guess, namely:
pod2latex UserGuide.pod(according to the 1.1 version of pod2latex this will automatically generate a UserGuide.tex file hence you must have write access to the directory in which the above command is carried out.)
You may also convert the pod pages to HTML (the HyperText Markup Language of World Wide Web documents). For example, command lines like the following (but subject to local variations - is your web_browser configured to allow local access to a file? - if not do this on a web-serving machine) should work for you:
pod2html perl5/Tk/UserGuide.pod > UserGuide.html web_browser_invocation UserGuide.htmlIn addition there is, on an experimental basis, a place to view the Tk-b9.01 .pod->.html files from the perl5/Tk directory at:
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/pod/(Please note that the perl pod specification does not allow for markup within a verbatim paragraph - yet font changes often seem to be in either the <XMP></XMP> or the <PRE></PRE> HTML environments generated by running many of these .pod files through the latest version of pod2html. Alert browsers are welcome to notify me of any errors in the hand-altered html files.)
Translators pod2texinfo, pod2fm, etc., also exist. Check a CPAN site for these scripts if you do not already have them.
Newer versions: In your Tk-b10++/doc directory there should be a number of .htm files. These were originally Tcl/Tk man pages, but have been converted to Perl syntax in html format.
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/doc/
Older versions: In your Tk-b#/doc directory there should be a number of .ht files. These are conversions of Tcl/Tk man pages to html. (If you wish to browse them at your own site you may wish to look at Mark Elston's cvtht script, or configure your web-server/browser to recognize the .ht extension as a text/html mime.type.) The .ht are helpful to the perl/Tk programmer trying to remember the name of an optional argument to pass to a given widget primitive. Note that insofar as these pages do specify syntax it pertains to Tcl/Tk not perl/Tk, hence they must be translated. The pages are on the web at:
http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/doc/index.html http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/b9.01-docnpod/doc/A miscellany of internet perl/Tk resources includes:
World Wide Web - perl/Tk man pages http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/doc/index.html http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/doc/ http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/pod/ Newsgroups comp.lang.perl.tk comp.lang.perl.misc comp.lang.perl.anounce comp.lang.tcl comp.lang.tcl.announce comp.answers news.answers Perl/Tk FAQ-Archives (ftp sites) [Note: FAQ may be many separate files] (see also CPAN sites) ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.lang.perl.tk ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/comp/lang/perl/tk ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq/ptk-faq ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/ 130.199.54.188 ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/ptkFAQ.txt 130.199.54.188 ftp://ftp.wpi.edu/perl5/pTk-FAQ 130.215.24.209 ftp://perl.com/pub/perl/doc/ptkFAQ.gz 199.45.129.30 ftp://perl.com/pub/perl/doc/ptkFAQ.ps.gz 199.45.129.30 WWW-FAQ for perl/Tk http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkTOC.html http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkFAQ.html World Wide Web - perl/Tk info sites http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/ http://fxfx.com/kgr/compound/ (Perl Tk Compound Widget Page) http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkIMG.html (FAQ image supplement) http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/etc/ http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/misc/ http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/PNMTYAK/ http://www.mirai.com/wks/ The Mailing list majordomo@lists.stanford.edu ptk@lists.stanford.edu
http://www.perl.com/perl/faq/Q2.2.htmlThe two early Perl books by Schwartz and Wall are very helpful (even if they do pertain to perl 4 and not 5. Beware that perl/Tk makes extensive use of perl 5 features.):
Learning Perl (The Llama)
Randal L. Schwartz
Copyright (c) 1993 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN 1-56592-042-2 (English)
ISBN 2-84177-005-2 (French)
ISBN 3-930673-08-8 (German)
ISBN 4-89502-678-1 (Japanese)
Programming Perl (The Camel)For Perl 5 there will be an update to the Camel ("Learning More Perl"? the Alpaca?) in preparation by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Christiansen, Larry Wall, and Stephen Potter, with a draft due at O'Reilly by the end of April 1996. There is some Perl5 (book material) information at:
Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz
Copyright (c) 1991 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN 0-937175-64-1 (English)
ISBN 3-446-17257-2 (German) (Programmieren in Perl, translator: Hanser Verlag)
ISBN 4-89052-384-7 (Japanese)
http://www.metronet.com/1h/perlinfo/perl5/Jon Orwant (the organizer of the comp.lang.perl.tk newgroup) will have a book on Perl 5 out in January 1996. (Please note that it is mostly about Perl 5, there is a some discussion of four simple Perl/Tk programs, but it is not a book wholly devoted to Perl/Tk.) The relevant info:
Perl 5 InteractiveThe perl 5 Quick Reference Guide (may require LaTeX for installation) can be obtained from any CPAN ftp site. Detailed location information is also available at the author's website:
Jon Orwant
The Waite Group Press
ISBN: 1-57169-064-6
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvromans/perlref.htmlThe quick reference guide has been turned into a small Nutshell handbook:
Perl 5 Desktop Reference
Johan Vromans
Copyright (c) February 1996 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN: 1-56592-187-9; Order number: 1879
Additional book information may be found at Tom Christiansen's perl & cgi books page. The multi-part perl 5 man pages are available (assuming they have been installed in your MANPATH, type man perl, man perlmod etc.).
The perl man pages are also available on the web at a number of locations including:
World Wide Web - perl 5.001m man pages (the 5.002 pages [listed below] are more useful though) Australia http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~slf/perl5/perl.html http://bwyan.anu.edu.au/perl.html Austria http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/comp/lang/perl/perl5man/perl.html Brazil http://www.lsi.usp.br/perl5/ Canada http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/perldoc/perl.html http://stoner.eps.mcgill.ca/perl/perl.html Germany http://www.t-informatik.ba-stuttgart.de/Perl5/perl.html http://www.dfv.rwth-aachen.de/doc/perl/perl.html Norway http://www.pvv.unit.no/sw/perl5/index.html Slovak Republic http://www.savba.sk/autori/perl/perl.html Slovenia http://www.ijs.si/perl/ Taiwan http://www.ccu.edu.tw/perl5/index.html UK http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~richardd/perl5/perl.html http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/perl/perl.html USA http://rhine.ece.utexas.edu/~kschu/perlman.html http://duggy.extern.ucsd.edu/perl/perl.html http://tbone.biol.scarolina.edu/~dean/perl/perl.html http://www.mit.edu:8001/perl/perl.html http://icg.stwing.upenn.edu/perl5/perl.html http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/public/compdoc/info/perl/perl.html World Wide Web - perl 5.002 man pages (also very useful for previous versions of perl 5) Canada http://dymaxion.ns.ca/www/dv/perl_manual/index.html http://wepil.uwaterloo.ca/~mathers/perl/perl.html Czech Republic http://infog.eunet.cz/~muaddib/perl5/index.html Finland http://www.hut.fi/~jhi/perl5/index.html Germany http://nat-www.uia.ac.be/perl/perl.html Netherlands http://www.cs.ruu.nl/pub/mirrors/CPAN/doc/manual/html/frame_index_long.html USA http://www.metronet.com/0/perlinfo/perl5/manual/perl.html http://www.lafayette.edu/doughera/doughera/perl/manual/perl.html http://www.va.pubnix.com/staff/stripes/perlinfo/ http://www.perl.com/perl/manual/ http://128.84.219.39/public/perl/manual/ http://www.ilap.com/perl/ http://saturn.lbcc.cc.or.us/www_root/docs/perl5/PERL.HTML
In addition to the CPAN ftp source sites, a miscellany of internet perl resources includes:
Newsgroups comp.lang.perl.misc comp.lang.perl.announce comp.lang.perl.modules comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi comp.answers news.answers Perl FAQ-Archives (ftp sites) [Note: FAQ may be many separate files] (see also the CPAN sites) North America ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq/ ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq 192.48.96.9 ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/faq.gz 198.59.155.28 Europe ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/NEWS.ANSWERS/perl-faq/ 131.211.80.17 ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/perl/FAQ 146.169.2.10 Gopher Perl FAQ gopher://gopher.metronet.com/11/perlinfo/faq WWW-FAQ for Perl http://www.perl.com/perl/faq/ http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/top.html http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/misc/top.html http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/announce/top.html http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/perl-faq/top.html Perl for Win32 FAQ (discusses Win95) http://www.perl.hip.com/PerlFaq.htm Perl info sites Gopher (gopher:70) USA gopher://gopher.metronet.com/11h/perlinfo World Wide Web (http:80) USA http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Languages/Perl/index.html http://www.perl.com/ http://www.khoros.unm.edu/staff/neilb/perl/home.html http://www.khoros.unm.edu:80/staff/neilb/perl/metaFAQ/ http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/ http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/perl5.html (Perl 5) http://www.eecs.nwu.edu/perl/perl.html http://128.84.219.39/public/perl/ http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Perl.html http://www.hermetica.com/technologia/unexec/ http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/perlWWW/ http://web.sau.edu/~mkruse/www/scripts/ http://orwant.www.media.mit.edu/the_perl_journal/ http://www.perl.com/Architext/AT-allperl.html http://www.mispress.com/introcgi/ http://www.walrus.com/~smithj/webcan/ http://web.syr.edu/~chsiao05/cps600_project.html http://www.iftech.com/classes/webdev/webdev_perl.htm http://www.cc.iastate.edu/perlmenu/ UK http://pubweb.nexor.co.uk/public/perl/perl.html http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/web/form.html Web references to Perl mailing lists http://www.perl.com/perl/info/mailing-lists.html http://www.nicoh.com/cgi-bin/lwgate/PERL5-PORTERS/ http://www.hut.fi/~jhi/perl5-porters.html http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/
Tcl and the Tk Toolkit
John K. Ousterhout
Copyright (c) 1994 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
ISBN 0-201-63337-X (alk. paper)
LOC QA76.73.T44097 1994; 005.13'3--dc20
Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk
Brent Welch
Copyright (c) 1995 Prentice Hall
ISBN 0-13-182007-9
Within the tclsh
or wish
shells your manpath
includes the tcl/tk man pages (which may not be in your login
manpath). Thus from the % prompt within either shell type commands
like:
% man -k Tk
The Tcl/Tk Reference Guide is also a source of useful information. Although it's Tcl specific most perl/Tk commands can be, more or less, easily derived from it. [As of Tk-b9.01 the names of some functions and some configuration options have changed slightly from their Tcl/Tk counterparts. With Tk-b9.01 (and higher) a great many functions start with an upper case letter and continue with all lower case letters (e.g. there is a perl/Tk Entry widget but no entry widget), and many configuration options are all lower case (e.g. there is a perl/Tk highlightthickness option but no highlightThickness option).] You may fetch the Tcl/Tk Reference Guide (may require LaTeX for installation) from:
ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/TkMail/tkref-4.0.1.tar.gz 134.79.18.30 ftp://ftp.aud.alcatel.com/tcl/docs/tkref-4.0.1.tar.gz 198.64.191.10There are a number of other Tcl/Tk resources on the internet including:
Newsgroups comp.lang.tcl comp.lang.tcl.announce comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi comp.answers news.answers FAQ-Archive (ftp) [Note: Tcl FAQ may be many files, Tk FAQ is one file] ftp://ftp.aud.alcatel.com/tcl/docs/ 198.64.191.10 ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/tcl-faq ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/tcl-faq/tk WWW-FAQ for Tcl/Tk http://www.smartpages.com/faqs/tcl-faq/top.html http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/tcl/top.html http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/tcl-faq/top.html http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/bngusenet/comp/lang/tcl/top.html http://www.sco.com/Technology/tcl/Tcl.html World Wide Web - Tcl/Tk info sites Canada http://web.cs.ualberta.ca/~wade/Auto/Tcl.html UK http://http2.brunel.ac.uk:8080/~csstddm/TCL2/TCL2.html http://www.cis.rl.ac.uk/proj/TclTk/ USA http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Languages/Tcl_Tk/index.html http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/docs.html http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/4.0.html http://www.sco.com/Technology/tcl/Tcl.html http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/ http://www.elf.org/tcltk-man-html/contents.html Tcl/Tk - miscellaneous extensions ftp://ftp.cme.nist.gov/pub/expect/ http://www.cs.hut.fi/~kjk/porttk.html http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ioi/tix/tix.html http://www.ece.cmu.edu/afs/ece/usr/svoboda/www/th/homepage.html http://www.tcltk.com/ [incr Tcl] http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/TclX.html http://www.eolas.com/eolas/webrouse/tcl.htm [WebWish] http://www.se.cuhk.hk/~hkng2/big5tk/big5tk.html http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~jhobbs/work/ [BLT etc.]
Previous | Return to table of contents | Next