About Coordinate Spaces and Transformations

Coordinate spaces and transformations are used by the following types of applications:

• Desktop publishing applications (to "zoom" parts of a page or to display adjacent pages in a window).
• Computer-aided design (CAD) applications (to rotate objects, scale drawings, or create perspective views).
• Spreadsheet applications (to move and size graphs).

The following illustrations show successive views of an object created in a drawing application. The first illustration shows the object as it appears in the original drawing; the succeeding five illustrations show the effects of applying various transformations.

The following subtopics describe various aspects of coordinate spaces and transformations.

• Transformation of Coordinate Spaces
• World-Space to Page-Space Transformations
• Page-Space to Device-Space Transformations
• Device-Space to Physical-Device Transformation
• Default Transformations