Hi Zentara, not quite sure what the post you linked to has to do with my problem. curselection gives indices of the cells not of strings inside the cells. And I want to modify the formatting of a section of the content of a given cell (for which I would need some indices to indicate which part of the content should my formatting apply to).

Sorry I didn't understand the question. From what I little I know, the only thing you can do with a TableMatrix is use the -selectcommand to pop a toplevel window with the cell's data into a text widget for editing. Maybe a smarter monk might know a way.

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. ..... an animated JAPH

No, you are not worrying too much. An often overlooked problem with Tk problems is memory gain due to the repeated creation and destruction of widgets. Quite often it is discovered too late, and much work has to be discarded as a memory hog, so it is best you watch your memory consumption as you develop any complex Tk script.

First, the only Tk widget that will allow this is the Tk::Canvas, so if you really want this feature, use a Canvas, build your own table of cells, and tag your cell text accordingly.

If you really want to stick with the TableMatrix, your current method of sticking a Text widget in the cell, and using it's tag features is your best shot. I would just caution that you create just one text widget for this purpose and reuse it. This should eliminate any creation/destruction memory gains. See "perldoc -q clear" for how to keep your reusable Text widget free of old data.

Thank you for your expertise. This is also the fear I have, and unfortunately I already make too much use of widget destroy and recreate in my big application (trying to convert it to a reuse policy).

Do you have a self-contained example of what works now and where in the code you would like to add this new feature?

Here it is a basic one. I want to apply my formatting only to the string "world"

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Tk;
use Tk::TableMatrix;
my $ArrayWidget;

my $mw = new MainWindow();

my $FontBold = $mw->Font( -weight => 'bold');


    my ($rows,$cols) = (50, 4);
    foreach my $row  (0..$rows){
        $ArrayWidget->{"$row,0"} = "$row";
    }
    foreach my $col  (0..$cols){
        $ArrayWidget->{"0,$col"} = "$col";
    }
my $table = $mw->Scrolled('TableMatrix',
        -state=>'disabled', 
        -rows => $rows, 
        -cols => $cols,
        -colwidth => 20,
        -height => 6,
        -titlerows => 1, 
        -titlecols => 1,
        -variable => $ArrayWidget,
        -wrap=>1,
        -multiline=>1,
        -scrollbars => 'osoe',
        -relief => 'flat',
        -selecttitles => 0,
        -highlightthickness=>0
)->pack();
$table->tagConfigure ("bold",  -bg => "#689bc0");
$ArrayWidget->{"2,2"} = "Hello world";
#Apply tag bold or different font to the string "world", i.e. not to t
+he entire cell 2.2
MainLoop();
[download]

In the mean time I came to the conclusion that this feature is not supported and that I need to insert in any cell another Widget supporting formatting. The question is if the table becomes to "heavy"/unstable if it grows in size and is frequently changed.