How to prevent Tkinter labelframe size changes when an empty label is inserted

Question

I create a LabelFrame widget. It has a nice size in the beginning:

import Tkinter
form = Tkinter.Tk()

errorArea = Tkinter.LabelFrame(form, text=" Errors ", width=250, height=80)
errorArea.grid(row=2, column=0, columnspan=2, sticky="E", \
             padx=5, pady=0, ipadx=0, ipady=0)

But when I insert an empty string in it, the errorArea widget's size adjusts according to the inserted string:

errorMessage = Tkinter.Label(errorArea, text="")
errorMessage.grid(row=0, column=0, padx=5, pady=2, sticky='W')

How do I give the errorArea widget a fixed size, so that its size won't change according to Lable inserted in it?

Answer 1

That problem always was interesting to me. One way I found to fix it is by using the place method instead of grid:

import Tkinter

form = Tkinter.Tk()

errorArea = Tkinter.LabelFrame(form, text=" Errors ", width=250, height=80)
errorArea.grid(row=2, column=0, columnspan=2, sticky="E", \
             padx=5, pady=0, ipadx=0, ipady=0)

errorMessage = Tkinter.Label(errorArea, text="")

# 1) 'x' and 'y' are the x and y coordinates inside 'errorArea'
# 2) 'place' uses 'anchor' instead of 'sticky'
# 3) There is no need for 'padx' and 'pady' with 'place'
# since you can specify the exact coordinates
errorMessage.place(x=10, y=10, anchor="w")

form.mainloop()

With this, the label is placed in the window without shrinking the labelframe.