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The Page

Quartz 2D uses the painter’s model for its imaging. In the painter’s model, each successive drawing operation applies a layer of “paint” to an output “canvas,” often called a page. The paint on the page can be modified by overlaying more paint through additional drawing operations. An object drawn on the page cannot be modified except by overlaying more paint. This model allows you to construct extremely sophisticated images from a small number of powerful primitives.

Figure 1-2 shows how the painter’s model works. To get the image in the top part of the figure, the shape on the left was drawn first followed by the solid shape. The solid shape overlays the first shape, obscuring all but the perimeter of the first shape. The shapes are drawn in the opposite order in the bottom of the figure, with the solid shape drawn first. As you can see, in the painter’s model the drawing order is important.

The page may be a real sheet of paper (if the output device is a printer); it may be a virtual sheet of paper (if the output device is a PDF file); it may even be a bitmap image. The exact nature of the page depends on the particular graphics context you use.

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