Subpixel positioning on Tk canvas

[Christian Gollwitzer]

Am 20.06.21 um 01:49 schrieb Terry Reedy:
> On 6/19/2021 12:42 AM, Christian Gollwitzer wrote:
>> Sorry for that answer, but Tkinter does not support many of the most 
>> useful extensions for Tcl/Tk, because someone has to write the 
>> wrappers. It only supports what is provided by base Tk. Among those I 
>> consider useful and use in almost any application are:
> 
> Are these extensions included with the tcl/tk distribution, or otherwise 
> available from active state?  Are this extensions included with Linux 
> installations of tcl/tk?  Or easily installed?

Since ActiveState has pulled out the developers of Tcl a few years ago, 
I haven't used ActiveTcl anymore. I was surprised to see that they 
actually offer a fairly recent version, but it also cannot be simply 
downloaded, one has to register. It was unclear to me if it costs money.

Other people have stepped in to provide Tcl distributions where tese 
extensions are included; notable exanples are BAWT by Paul Obermeier 
http://www.bawt.tcl3d.org/download.html which offers all of the 
mentioned packages (and many more), Androwish/Undroidwish by Christian 
Werner which was originally developed for Android, but now works on te 
major desktop platforms, http://androwish.org/home/wiki?name=undroidwish 
and even kbskit can be mentioned, started by Rene Zaumseil and now 
updated in irregular intervals by me https://github.com/auriocus/kbskit

I haven't checked the major linux distros, but they also might ship with 
some of these extensions.

Concerning installation, it differs. Tablelist (also part of tklib) and 
pdf4tcl are pure-Tcl packages and therefore easily installed.
TkDnD, TkTable and tkTreeCtrl are compiled extensions and therefore more 
difficult - however, due to the stubs mechanism of Tcl, the version 
number of Tcl and C compiler do NOT need to match. Typically a binary 
downloaded for the right OS and bitness will work, and compilation from 
source works with an autoconf-based configure script.

Due to ActiveState's failure with the teapot, the Tcl world does now not 
any longer have a central repository tool like "pip" which works for 
everyone. This has just recently been discussed on comp.lang.tcl, but it 
is unlikely to happen in the near future.

It is of course unrealistic to expect that Tkinter supports every odd Tk 
extension fron the Tcl world, which might not even be maintained any 
longer. OTOH there are extensions that are well-maintained, that could 
as well be part of the core Tk, but aren't for political reasons. If 
Tkinter continues to be the shipped "first choice" GUI for Python, then 
a few could be included - or otherwise Tkinter will lack Drag'n'drop for 
ever and a reasonable Tree widget (the core one is verrrry basic).

Best regards,

             Christian