Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By : Alan D. Moore
Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a lightweight, portable, and easy-to-use graphical toolkit available in the Python Standard Library, widely used to build Python GUIs due to its simplicity and availability. This book teaches you to design and build graphical user interfaces that are functional, appealing, and user-friendly using the powerful combination of Python and Tkinter. After being introduced to Tkinter, you will be guided step-by-step through the application development process. Over the course of the book, your application will evolve from a simple data-entry form to a complex data management and visualization tool while maintaining a clean and robust design. In addition to building the GUI, you'll learn how to connect to external databases and network resources, test your code to avoid errors, and maximize performance using asynchronous programming. You'll make the most of Tkinter's cross-platform availability by learning how to maintain compatibility, mimic platform-native look and feel, and build executables for deployment across popular computing platforms. By the end of this book, you will have the skills and confidence to design and build powerful high-end GUI applications to solve real-world problems.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Drawing and animation with Tkinter's Canvas


The Canvas widget is undoubtedly the most powerful widget available in Tkinter. It can be used to build anything from custom widgets and views to complete user interfaces. As the name implies, Canvas is a blank area on which figures and images can be drawn.

A Canvas object can be created like any other widget:

root = tk.Tk()
canvas = tk.Canvas(root, width=1024, height=768)
canvas.pack()

Canvas accepts the usual widget configuration arguments, as well as width and height for setting its size. Once created, we can start adding items to canvas using its many create_() methods.

For example, we can add a rectangle with this code:

canvas.create_rectangle(100, 100, 200, 200, fill='orange')

The first four arguments are the coordinates of the upper-left and lower-right corners, in pixels from the upper-left corner of the canvas. Each create_() method begins like this, with coordinates defining the shape. The fill option specifies the color of the inside of the...