I'm surprised that nobody ever wanted to make a word or phrase stand out in a text string. I do it all the time in html with the CGI strong or font functions(or css) but I guess that there is no easy way to do this in Tk. Thanks for the replies.

I always got the impressoin that this type of thing was done pretty much as above - you create separate graphical elements to encapsulate each change in font. This is likely closely linked to how tags (whether HTML or proprietary or other) work as well: you begin a block, and then end it, and each block gets to be its own graphical element.

It certainly can be done, and the complexity depends on what you call easy :-)

Using the standard label/button widgets, it can't be done because those accept simple text.

However, you can create widgets of your own in Tk, and you can subclass a Button/whatever if you want.

Then you can implement whichever display/graphic you want, really. You can use Rich Text capabilities in there, etc.

A label is trivial - a region with text drawn on it. Button is now much harder - the same region, just bounded in a way that makes it feel 3D and responds to mouse clicks.

In Tk, it should be theoretically possible, but I don't think you could in HTML unless you had a graphic for your button and did it prior to display.

Update: Apologies for my response. I somehow missed the node title and looked only at the question.

In some cases, you can make do by using a text widget, which allows a lot more freedom in formatting. This works particularly well as a replacement for a regular label. But that's less useful for things like checkbuttons, because a checkbutton label is clickable, and your text widget wouldn't behave like that by default. You'd have to bind it manually.