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# Stacking Objects

You can create many different artistic effects by stacking objects. By combining shapes and images, you can add interesting graphic effects to your forms. You do, however, need to have some understanding of how your objects behave.

The objects in your form have the following “stacking” hierarchy:

1. Placeable bitmaps, signature fields, circle fields, and barcode fields (equal)

2. Data fields

3. Text boxes and system text boxes

4. Images

5. Lines

6. Rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles, and ellipses

This means that if you have two different objects and one of them is a rectangle, the rectangle will always be on the bottom. You have already seen how this works when we applied background shading and borders to objects. When you are working with shapes and images, lines will always appear on top of rectangles, and images will appear on top of both.

Note:

The color in data fields, circle fields, placeable bitmaps, and barcode fields is transparent and other objects will show through. However, data field text, circle borders, bar codes, and inserted bitmaps are not and will cover the objects below them.

Within an object type, the last object added will be the “top” object. If you were to stack a group of rounded rectangles and ellipses, the last one added would be on top. This is not always the effect you want. For example, suppose you want to stack the two ellipses below so that you have a crosshatched ellipse with a colored background:

Because the solid ellipse was added last, it is the topmost object. If we center these two objects, the solid ellipse will obscure the hatched one. To get the effect we want, we need to make the hatched ellipse the top object.

To place an object on top

1. Select the object you want to place on top.

2. Cut the object to the clipboard.

3. Paste it back into your form. Since it is now the last object added, it will be on top:

4. Position the two objects the way you want. In the example below, we positioned them exactly on top of each other to create a filled hatched pattern: