bitmap images in tcltk

Dear Dirk,

The tkrplot package is indeed interesting, but my understanding is that 
it's for putting R graphics in a widget. My bitmaps are for things like 
button-tops. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Regards,
 John

At 01:53 PM 5/6/2003 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 02:24:10PM -0400, John Fox wrote:

I'm writing a package using tcltk. Thanks to Peter Dalgaard's excellent
work on the tcltk package, almost everything has gone very smoothly. I'm

Seconded. It is truly excellent, and cross-platform without any heachaches.

stymied, however, by the following problem:

I want to incorporate a bitmap image, stored as an xbm file, in a widget.
To take a simple example,

    top <- tktoplevel()
    tkgrid(tklabel(top, bitmap="@file.xbm", fg="red"))

will work as long as file.xbm is in the current directory; 

alternatively, I

could specify the path to this file. The problem is that I can't figure 

out

a reliable way of predicting (or discovering) where the bitmap file will
reside when my package is installed.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

There is a much easier solution thanks to Luke's tkrplot which is available
for win32 and unix on CRAN.  A simple example is

tt <- tktoplevel()
pl <- tkrplot(tt, function() plot(1:10, main="foo"))
tkpack(pl)

It can do fancier stuff too by using a 'replot' feature. The example from
the help page varies a simple function by tieing a callback command and
variable from a scale to a function around tkreplot():

    tt <- tktoplevel()
    bb<-1
    img <-tkrplot(tt, function() plot(1:20,(1:20)^bb))
    f<-function(...) {
        b <- as.numeric(tclvalue("bb"))
        if (b != bb) {
            bb <<- b
            tkrreplot(img)
        }
    }
    s <- tkscale(tt, command=f, from=0.05, to=2.00, variable="bb",
                 showvalue=FALSE, resolution=0.05, orient="horiz")
    tkpack(img,s)

-----------------------------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M4
email: jfox at mcmaster.ca
phone: 905-525-9140x23604
web: www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox
-----------------------------------------------------