Steve's Tcl Page

Tcl/Tk is a freely available (with source) scripting language and associated GUI toolkit written by John Ousterhout and others which is now looked after by a group of open source developers and is hosted on sourceforge.net. The nice thing about Tcl/Tk is the ease with which it can be extended with C/C++ coded procedures for specific tasks. It also provides a very nice platform independent solution since it runs on Windows 95/NT, Macintosh and Unix systems.

My major involvement with Tcl/Tk is via the Emu Speech database system which uses Tcl/Tk as a scripting language and to provide various GUI tools for speech database creation and manipulation. A couple of packages have been developed for that project which are available separately:

• progman.tcl uses the dde package to allow creation of program groups and shortcuts in the start menu on Windows 9x/NT. A simple example of useage is shown at the end of the file.
• stemmer.zip is a tcl package to find word stems (eg. consoled -> console) using Porter's algorithm. To install, unzip onto your auto_path.
• Emu-Graph is a tcl-only data plotting package which renders graphs on a tk canvas widget. It can be used to plot data inside web browsers using the tcl plugin. It is rather slow for large numbers of points. You can see a demonstration of the graph package if you have the Tcl plugin. You can download it here: emu-graph1.1.2.zip.
• Padgraph is another data plotting package which is coded in C for speed. It provides a new widget, the padgraph widget, which can render plots of 2d data very quickly (we use it for speech data with > 50000 points per graph and get fairly smooth scrolling on even 486 based machines). Note: as of July '03, this is known not to build standalone. It will eventually be made TEA compliant -- anyone willing to lend a hand would be much appreciated. You can get a version that will build by downloading the Emu source code. Download padgraph here: padgraph-1.1.zip
• The pad widget underlies the padgraph widget and provides a pixmap drawable for tk. I am releasing an updated version of this code after a request in comp.lang.tcl for such a widget. Future development will depend on others to make some contribution to the design and implementation of the widget. Download it here: pad-0.95.tar.gz.
• I'm part of a small group defining standard interfaces for speech annotation tools. My first contribution is a display widget API and sample implementation in tcl.
• The Useless Tcl Extension is an attempt to put together a minimal example extension to help people produce or port extensions to the Macintosh.
• There is an effort underway to define some tools for building installers with tcl and tk. You can post comments at the wiki. TIP 55 describes a format for installable Tcl packages.I've put together some code as a first stab at a Tcl extension installer which can download and install extensions from a web based archive (like this one). Comments are encouraged.