1.7. Saving and Restoring the Drawing Surface

In Section 1.2.2, “Saving and Restoring Canvas State,” on p. 11, you saw how to save and restore a context’s state. Saving and restoring context state lets you make temporary state changes, which is something you will do frequently.

Another essential feature of the Canvas context is the ability to save and restore the drawing surface itself. Saving and restoring the drawing surface lets you draw on the drawing surface temporarily, which is useful for many things, such as rubber bands, guidewires, or annotations. For example, the application shown in Figure 1.15 and discussed in Section 2.13.1, “Translating, Scaling, and Rotating,” on p. 171, lets users interactively create polygons by dragging the mouse.