Groups

A group is a container for ordered collections of shapes, with the shapes at the top (front of the container) drawn last and the shapes at the bottom drawn first (end of the container).

The current implementation is very simplistic, and doesn't even try to do anything smart like taking into account occlusion or anything else. Instead all objects are simply drawn and it is left to cairo to take care of efficiency. At the current time there are no plans to improve this behavior, since it runs 'fast enough' for now.

Groups are also useful since transforms upon the group are also applied to the contained objects. Thus, scaling, translating or rotating a group has the same effect as performing those operations upon each member of the group.

The following contains an example that adds several shapes to a group, then rotates the entire group by 45 degrees counter-clockwise.

Group and shapes drawn by example code below