Special Edition Using Java 2 Standard Edition

Rendering 101

Java 2D's Graphics2D methods render shapes, text, and images onto a drawing surface. These shapes can be constructed, either from Graphics drawing methods (such as drawArc) or from objects created from Java 2D's geometry classes (such as Ellipse). (These classes will be explored in an upcoming section.)

In the past, you could only choose one rendering state attribute: the current color. This color attribute would subsequently be used when drawing a shape or text. Furthermore, it would be used to fill a solid shape. In contrast, Java 2D's Graphics2D context maintains several state attributes. These state attributes can be divided into the following categories: rendering hint, stroke, paint (also known as fill), transform, clipping ...