Table of Contents

Colors

Fonts

Text Formatting

Borders

Cursors

 Colors

Most widgets allow you to specify the widget and text colors, using the background and foreground options. To specify a color, you can either use a color name, or explicitly specify the red, green, and blue (RGB) color components.

 Color Names

Tkinter includes a color database which maps color names to the corresponding RGB values. This database includes common names like Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, and LightBlue, but also more exotic things like Moccasin, PeachPuff, etc.

On an X window system, the color names are defined by the X server. You might be able to locate a file named xrgb.txt which contains a list of color names and the corresponding RGB values. On Windows and Macintosh systems, the color name table is built into Tk.

Under Windows, you can also use the Windows system colors (these can be changed by the user via the control panel):

SystemActiveBorder, SystemActiveCaption, SystemAppWorkspace, SystemBackground, SystemButtonFace, SystemButtonHighlight, SystemButtonShadow, SystemButtonText, SystemCaptionText, SystemDisabledText, SystemHighlight, SystemHighlightText, SystemInactiveBorder, SystemInactiveCaption, SystemInactiveCaptionText, SystemMenu, SystemMenuText, SystemScrollbar, SystemWindow, SystemWindowFrame, SystemWindowText.

On the Macintosh, the following system colors are available:

SystemButtonFace, SystemButtonFrame, SystemButtonText, SystemHighlight, SystemHighlightText, SystemMenu, SystemMenuActive, SystemMenuActiveText, SystemMenuDisabled, SystemMenuText, SystemWindowBody.

Color names are case insensitive. Many (but not all) color names are also available with or without spaces between the words. For example, "lightblue", "light blue", and "Light Blue" all specify the same color.

 RGB Specifications

If you need to explicitly specify a color, you can use a string with the following format:

    #RRGGBB

RR, GG, BB are hexadecimal representations of the red, green and blue values, respectively. The following sample shows how you can convert a color 3-tuple to a Tk color specification:

    tk_rgb = "#%02x%02x%02x" % (128, 192, 200)

Tk also supports the forms "#RGB" and "#RRRRGGGGBBBB" to specify each value with 16 and 65536 levels, respectively.

You can use the winfo_rgb widget method to translate a color string (either a name or an RGB specification) to a 3-tuple:

    rgb = widget.winfo_rgb("red")
    red, green, blue = rgb[0]/256, rgb[1]/256, rgb[2]/256

Note that winfo_rgb returns 16-bit RGB values, ranging from 0 to 65535. To map them into the more common 0-255 range, you must divide each value by 256 (or shift them 8 bits to the right).