Description All drawing operations in GDK take a graphics context (GC) argument. A graphics context encapsulates information about the way things are drawn, such as the foreground color or line width. By using graphics contexts, the number of arguments to each drawing call is greatly reduced, and communication overhead is minimized, since identical arguments do not need to be passed repeatedly. Most values of a graphics context can be set at creation time by using gdk_gc_new_with_values(), or can be set one-by-one using functions such as gdk_gc_set_foreground(). A few of the values in the GC, such as the dash pattern, can only be set by the latter method.