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Path Building Blocks

Cocoa defines several fundamental data types for manipulating geometric information in the drawing environment. These data types include NSPoint, NSRect, and NSSize. You use these data types to specify lines, rectangles, and width and height information for the shapes you want to draw. Everything from lines and rectangles to circles, arcs, and Bezier curves can be specified using one or more of these data structures.

The coordinate values for point, rectangle, and size data types are all specified using floating-point values. Floating-point values allow for much finer precision as the resolution of the underlying destination device goes up.

The NSPoint, NSRect, and NSSize data types have equivalents in the Quartz environment: CGPoint, CGRect, and CGSize. Because the layout of the Cocoa and Quartz types are identical, you can convert between two types by casting from one type to its counterpart.

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