Tk 4.0b3 Release Announement
March 25, 1995

John Ousterhout
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
john.ousterhout@eng.sun.com

I have just released Tk4.0b3, the third beta release of Tk4.0, and
Tcl7.4b3, the corresponding Tcl release.  They are available via FTP
from ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in the following files:
	/ucb/tcl/tk4.0b3.tar.Z
	/ucb/tcl/tcl7.4b3.tar.Z
	/ucb/tcl/tk4.0b3.patch.Z
	/ucb/tcl/tcl7.4b3./patch.Z
The latter two files are patch files that will upgrade from the b2
release to the b3 releases.  All of these files should appear on the
usual mirror sites within a few days.

There are very few changes in Tcl7.4b3, just a few bug fixes plus
better support for tracking commands that have been renamed.

On the other hand, Tk4.0b3 has quite a few changes, some of them
fairly significant.  Here is a summary of what's new:

    1. Dozens of bug fixes.
    2. Overhauled the focus mechanism to fix problems in the earlier
       Tk4.0 beta releases.  Added -force option to "focus" command;
       Tk won't steal the focus otherwise.  Added -takefocus option
       to all widgets, rewrote tk_focusPrev and tk_focusNext to use
       them, and to be more discriminating about when windows receive
       the focus.
    3. Overhauled color management so that color requests don't fail;
       if the colormap fills up, Tk just picks the closest color.
       Eliminated the colormodel mechanism, including the "tk colormodel"
       command.  Changed the 3D border mechanism to allocate shadow colors
       lazily:  if they're never needed, they're never allocated.  When
       colors run out, shadows are drawn with stipples instead of separate
       colors.
    4. Improvements to text: added support for tabs, plus -overstrike
       tag option and -nocase option for searching.  Modified syntax
       of "search" command to provide more control over search range.
    5. Changed Tk's keysym mechanism to support manufacturer-specific
       and site-specific keysyms.
    6. Added -highlightbackground and -takefocus options to all widgets.
    7. Added -xscrollincrement and -yscrollincrement options to canvases
       as replacement for the old -scrollincremenet, which was deleted
       in 4.0b1.
    8. Added "insert" widget command to menus.
    9. Change display code to display standard control characters as
       \n, \b, etc. instead of \xa.
    10. Removed "snap-back" behavior from scales and scrollbars.
    11. Added support for "-resolution 0" to scales, plus improved
        computation of how many digits to display.
    12. Added "idle" option to "after" command for creating idle handlers.
    13. Restored old behavior of %A in bindings, so that it returns
        printing characters once again.
    14. Added "winfo allmapped" command.
    15. Changed binding mechanism to ignore Enter, Leave, and Focus events
        with a detail of NotifyInferior.
    16. Made changes throughout Tk to eliminate use of unsigned ints and
        just use ints instead:  unsigneds can cause subtle arithmetic
	problems in some places.
    17. Added more support for tk_strictMotif:  it now turns off menu
        activate colors and button display (the button text no longer
	slides up and down when you click).

I hope that this release will be the last one with major functional changes
for Tk4.0, and that it fixes all the major problems with the earlier beta
releases.  I still have a lot of bugs to fix (some dating as far back as
late January), but I think they are mostly small ones that have only been
noticed by a single person so far.  I hope to get completely caught up on
bugs over the next month and to make b4 releases in late April.  If all
goes well, these will be the last beta releases for Tk4.0 and Tcl7.4;
once they've been out a few weeks with no major problems I will rename
them as the final Tk4.0/Tcl7.4 releases.

If you've been putting off trying out Tk4.0 and Tcl7.4, now would be a
good time to give them a try.  Any problems not found within the next
few weeks are not likely to get fixed in time for the final releases.