Python Programming On Win32

Geometry Management

Tkinter provides a powerful concept typically not found in Windows GUI toolkits, and that is geometry management. Geometry management is the technique used to lay out child widgets in their parent (for example, controls in a dialog box). Most traditional Windows environments force you to specify the absolute position of each control. Although this is specified in dialog units rather than pixels and controls can be moved once created, Tkinter provides a far more powerful and flexible model.

Tkinter widgets provide three methods for geometry management, pack(), grid(), or place().

place() is the simplest mechanism and similar to what most Windows users are used to; each widget has its position explicitly specified, either in absolute or relative coordinates. The grid() mechanism, as you may expect, automatically aligns the widgets in a grid pattern, while the pack() method is the most powerful and the most commonly used. When widgets are packed, they are automatically positioned based on the size of the parent and the other widgets already placed. All of these techniques allow customization of the layout process, such as the padding between widgets.

These geometry-management capabilities allow you to define user interfaces that aren’t tied to particular screen resolutions and can automatically resize and layout controls as the window size changes, capabilities that most experienced Windows user-interface programmers will know are otherwise difficult to achieve. ...