[Has anyone written a tool which would graphically display text in various tickler / banner formats, fonts, colors, etc. - something that could be used for alerts, advertising, whatever?]
RS: strimj - string image routines contains code for administering and using pixel fonts in pure-Tcl, which might also be used for fixed-pitch ASCII banners as known from 1970's printouts :)
strimj::text "Hello"
returns a banner-like human-readable pattern (as a string, with newlines), that can be fed into the other routines (or puts [string map {. " "} …]:
@...@.......@.@...... @...@.......@.@...... @...@..@@@..@.@..@@@. @@@@@.@...@.@.@.@...@ @...@.@@@@@.@.@.@...@ @...@.@.....@.@.@...@ @...@.@...@.@.@.@...@ @...@..@@@..@.@..@@@.
I had noticed that. I was hoping to find something more like graphical text transformations - if you've ever seen powerpoint, it has several tool sets for displaying text flying in, crawling in, typewriter style, etc. Something of those types, which could be used in a bit more dynamic way (say, with a second program web scraping, then display news headlines, log file or machine up times, etc.) was what was in mind.
Thanks though! - RS: If you want typewriter-animation effects, see slow text - but support of fonts and colors is just generic to most Tk widgets, so just tweak them as needed.
For a retro text based look and for a bitmapped 8x8 font see curses banners. See also bigcaps.