Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

DRAWING BASICS

The previous section describes the UsePrintPreview example program, which draws some simple shapes and text. It focuses mostly on the PrintDocument events that support the printing process, however, and glosses over exactly how the graphics are drawn.

A program uses three things to produce graphics: a Graphics object, pens, and brushes. It uses those things whether the output should be printed on a printer, displayed on the screen, or drawn into an image file such as a bitmap or JPG file.

The following sections describe Graphics objects, pens, and brushes.

Graphics Objects

A Graphics object represents a drawing surface. You can think of it as the canvas or paper on which the program will draw.

The Graphics class provides many methods for drawing lines, rectangles, curves, and other shapes. The following table summarizes these methods.

METHOD	DESCRIPTION
DrawArc	Draws an arc of an ellipse.
DrawBezier	Draws a Bézier curve.
DrawBeziers	Draws a series of Bézier curves.
DrawClosedCurve	Draws a smooth closed curve that joins a series of points, connecting the final point to the first point.
DrawCurve	Draws a smooth curve that joins a series of points. This is similar to a DrawClosedCurve, except that it doesn’t connect the final point to the first point.
DrawEllipse	Draws an ellipse. (To draw a circle, draw an ellipse with equal width and height.)
DrawIcon	Draws an icon.
DrawIconUnstretched	Draws an icon without scaling. If you know that you will not ...