Saving and Restoring Shapes
In memory, a QuickDraw GX shape consists of a shape object and (by reference) several other objects, including a style, an ink, and a transform. The locations and internal structures of those objects are private.If you need to save a shape in a document or other external storage form, or transmit it across a network, or otherwise preserve its information in a public format, you can convert, or flatten, its object-based description into a stream-based description. Conversely, you can restore the object-based description of an object from its flattened form.
The flattened, stream-based format for most objects is documented in the stream format chapter of Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Environment and Utilities. (Fonts have their own flattened format; see the font objects chapter of Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Typography for more information.) How to flatten and unflatten shape objects is described in the section "Flattening and Unflattening Shapes" beginning on page 2-39
in this chapter.