




 
When the port's 
drawing-mode
 is 
:quality
 the graphics state parameter  
compositing-mode 
determines how the colors are combined, and 
operation
 is ignored.
compositing-mode
 
:over
 means draw over the existing values, blending alpha values if they exist.
compositing-mode
 
:copy
 means that the source is written to the destination ignoring the existing values. If the source has alpha and the target does not, that has the effect of converting semi-transparent source to solid. 
:copy
 is especially useful for creating transparent and semi-transparent pixmap ports, which can be displayed directly or converted to images by 
make-image-from-port
.
Further compositing-mode values are supported on later versions of Cocoa and GTK+.
CAPI User Guide (Macintosh version) - 30 Aug 2011