About Coordinate Spaces and Transformations

Coordinate spaces and transformations are used, for example, by desktop publishing applications to "zoom" parts of a page or to display adjacent pages in a window; computer-aided design (CAD) applications use them to rotate objects, scale drawings, or to create perspective views; and spreadsheet applications use them 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 five remaining illustrations show the effects of applying various transformations.

Original View

Scaled View

Translated View

Rotated View

Sheared View

Reflection