Setting up TkHtml (a Tk widget) with Python

Question

I need a simple way to render HTML pages retrieved with Requests (python-requests.org). I'm using Python 3.2 on Windows.

I was using tkinter, and I found a Tk widget called TkHtml. It is described at http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/ and a DLL is downloadable from http://www.hwaci.com/sw/tkhtml/. I found a python wrapper at http://tix.sourceforge.net/Tixapps/src/Python/TkHtml.py.

I don't know how to get TkHtml working in python. Is there some standard way of handling 3rd party Tk widgets?

I put tkhtml.dll in Python32\DLLs (no idea if this is right) and put TkHtml.py in Python32\Lib\site-packages. I went ahead and fixed the imports in TkHtml.py to work with Python 3 (changed tkFileDialog to tkinter.filedialog and Tkinter to tkinter).

When I do:

import TkHtml
app=TkHtml.TestApp()

I get the error:

...
File "C:\Program Files\Python32\lib\site-packages\TkHtml.py", line 45, in __init__
master.tk.call("package", "require", "tkhtml")
_tkinter.TclError: can't find package tkhtml

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I created a pip-installable Python wrapper for Tkhtml3: https://bitbucket.org/aivarannamaa/tkinterhtml

It comes with TkHtml3 binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Answer 2

Find your Python tcl directory eg. C:\Python32\tcl . This is where tcl/tk extensions go.

Create a new folder in there called Tkhtml.

Into this folder put (1) your .dll file , (2) a text file called pkgIndex.tcl

pkgIndex.tcl contains a line like this:

package ifneeded Tkhtml 0.0 [list load [file join $dir tkhtml.dll]]

If you can do this at the python prompt,

>>> import Tkinter #tkinter
>>> root = Tkinter.Tk()
>>> root.tk.eval('package require Tkhtml')
'0.0'

... then the package is available. The string '0.0' represents the version number.