Core Graphics Layer Drawing

CGLayer objects (CGLayerRef data type) allow your application to use layers for drawing.

Layers are suited for the following:

• High-quality offscreen rendering of drawing that you plan to reuse. For example, you might be building a scene and plan to reuse the same background. Draw the background scene to a layer and then draw the layer whenever you need it. One added benefit is that you don’t need to know color space or device-dependent information to draw to a layer.

• Repeated drawing. For example, you might want to create a pattern that consists of the same item drawn over and over. Draw the item to a layer and then repeatedly draw the layer, as shown in Figure 12-1. Any Quartz object that you draw repeatedly—including CGPath, CGShading, and CGPDFPage objects—benefits from improved performance if you draw it to a CGLayer. Note that a layer is not just for onscreen drawing; you can use it for graphics contexts that aren’t screen-oriented, such as a PDF graphics context.

• Buffering. Although you can use layers for this purpose, you shouldn’t need to because the Quartz Compositor makes buffering on your part unnecessary. If you must draw to a buffer, use a layer instead of a bitmap graphics context.

You need to perform the tasks described in the following section to draw using a CGLayer object:

1. “Create a CGLayer Object Initialized with an Existing Graphics Context”  CGLayerCreateWithContext 

2. “Get a Graphics Context for the Layer”     CGLayerGetContext 

3. “Draw to the CGLayer Graphics Context”    CGContextFillRect (myLayerContext, myRect)

4. “Draw the Layer to the Destination Graphics Context”

   When you are ready to draw the layer to its destination graphics context you can use either of the following functions:

   • CGContextDrawLayerInRect, which draws a layer to a graphics context in the rectangle specified.

   • CGContextDrawLayerAtPoint, which draws the layer to a graphics context at the point specified.