GTK, the Gimp Tool Kit, is a widget set for the graphical user interface. It is available for quite a lot platforms.

As usual for projects developed with/for Unix like operating systems (e.g. Linux) GTK is written in plain C. The ordinary plain C lacks the possibility of object orientated programming (OOP). But a widget calls for OOP, so the C implementation is a little bit ugly to deal with.

Making GTK available to Pascal programmers requires a translation of the C header files of GTK. This is available at the FreePascal homepage. Since those header files are a straight translation from C there is still no OOP included.

The idie of eliminating this lack lead to th founding of the GTKpas project. It is an OO wrapper for GTK. Each widget is represented by a class. The classes have relationships between each other (inheritance).

Programming a GUI is much more fun with GTKpas compared to direct usage of the GTK functions.

In addition to the standard GTK a wrapper for GtkGLArea namely GTKpasGLArea is available. These wrappers simplify embedding OpenGL drawing area in a GTK window.

Almost 20 examples explaining the usage of the GTKpas widgets have been taken from the GTK tutorial and translated to Pascal.

GTKpas is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). You may freely download and distribute it as long as you supply the copyright information.

You can download the released files at the SourceForge.net Release page.

1. FreePascal
2. FPC GTK package
3. FPC OpenGL package (only for GTKpasGLArea)
4. GtkGLArea (only for GTKpasGLArea, Attention: Use an older version which is made for GTK-1 instead of GTK-2, gtkglarea5-1.2.3 workes fine for me)
5. GNU make

The project page at SourceForge can be viewed here.

I would like to hear from you. Please send me an EMail to Johann.Glaser@gmx.at. If you encounter problems, have any questions or find bugs, please feel free to contact me. I am interested in your comments, suggestions, ideas, so drop me a mail too, please.

When you want to help me completing GTKpas (see Todo) it will be necessary that I describe you the technique writing a wrapper class.

No, GTKpas is not ready yet. It is far away from being really ready. But it can by used in your own projects. In the source distribution there are included nearly 20 example programs. A complete project using GTKpas is GLWaves.

Things to do are at least:

• check if the bug in CObject.Destroy is away
• make the examples more OOP like
• add the remaining wrapper classes
• add the remaining examples from the GTK tutorial.
• write documentation for all classes, methods and properties
• find the bug in C[VH]Scale
• find the bug in rangewidgets.pas example (huge window)
• find why some examples SigSegV on exit.
• find why some examples dont't exit when their window is closed
• make a "Links:" section on the homepage for projects using GTKpas
• find why CDialog doesn't free all memory
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