Drawing to an Image

Drawing to an Image

It is possible to create images programmatically by locking focus on an NSImage object and drawing other images or paths into the image context. This technique is most useful for creating images that you intend to render to the screen, although you can also save the resulting image data to a file.

Listing 6-1 shows you how to create a new empty image and configure it for drawing. When creating a blank image, you must specify the size of the new image in pixels. If you lock focus on an image that contains existing content, the new content is composited with the old content. When drawing, you can use any routines that you would normally use when drawing to a view.

Listing 6-1  Drawing to an image

NSImage* anImage = [[NSImage alloc] initWithSize:NSMakeSize(100.0, 100.0)];

[anImage lockFocus];

// Do your drawing here...

[anImage unlockFocus];

// Draw the image in the current context.

[anImage drawAtPoint:NSMakePoint(0.0, 0.0)

fromRect: NSMakeRect(0.0, 0.0, 100.0, 100.0)

operation: NSCompositeSourceOver

fraction: 1.0];

Drawing to an image creates an NSCachedImageRep object or uses an existing cached image representation, if one exists. Even when you use the lockFocusOnRepresentation: method to lock onto a specific image representation, you do not lock onto the representation itself. Instead, you lock onto the cached offscreen window associated with that image representation. This behavior might seem confusing but reinforces(增强，补充) the notion of the immutability of images and their image representations.

Images and their representations are considered immutable for efficiency and safety reasons. If you consider the image files stored in your application bundle, would you really want to make permanent changes to the original image? Rather than change the original image data, NSImage and its image representations modify a copy of that data. Modifying a cached copy of the data is also more efficient for screen-based drawing because the data is already in a format ready for display on the screen.