Tk 4.0 Release Announcement

July 1, 1995

John Ousterhout
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
john.ousterhout@eng.sun.com

This message is to announce new releases of the Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit. The new releases are Tcl 7.4 and Tk 4.0; they have been in development for about a year and a half and have been in beta test for the last six months.

What's new:

Tk 4.0 is a major new release with many improvements over Tk 3.6. Here is a short list of a few of the most important new features:

Tk 4.0 includes a general-purpose mechanism for displaying color images, with built-in support for PPM and GIF formats and an extension mechanism for adding other formats.
The text widget has many new features, including tab stops, embedded widgets, horizontal scrolling, and enough new formatting options to display HTML level 2.
The binding mechanism in Tk 4.0 is much more powerful and composable than it was in Tk 3.6.
Motif compliance is much better. For example, there is now support for keyboard traversal and focus highlights, and the default color scheme has changed to gray.
Many widgets have been improved. For example, buttons and labels can display multi-line justified text and scales can handle real values.
Color handling has been improved: colors never "run out" anymore.

There are also several incompatibilities in Tk 4.0, so most scripts for Tk 3.6 will need some modification to run under Tk 4.0. For more information on what has changed in Tk 4.0 and how to modify Tk 3.6 scripts to run under Tk 4.0, see the file doc/tk4.0.ps in the distribution.

A copy of this document is also available at the URL:
http://www.smli.com/research/tcl/tk4.0.ps

The file README in the distribution also has additional information on installing the release.

Tcl 7.4 is a minor new release with only a few new features and no script-level incompatibilities with Tcl 7.3 (there is one incompatibility that affects C extensions). See the README file in the distribution for details on the changes and for information on installing the release.

Where to get the new releases:

Tk 4.0b4 and Tcl 7.4b4 are currently available from two FTP servers, ftp.smli.com (in the directory /pub/tcl) and ftp.cs.berkeley.edu (in the directory /ucb/tcl). The releases should appear on the usual mirror sites within a few days. The new releases are in the files tk4.0.tar.Z and tcl7.4.tar.Z.

For additional information:

There is a set of Web pages on Tcl and Tk maintained by the Tcl/Tk group at Sun Laboratories. They can be accessed via the URL:
http://www.smli.com/research/tcl