1.3 The Nothing Pict🔗ℹ

The constant nothing is a static pict that behaves in general as if it isn’t there. It has no drawing, and it has a width and height of 0. Attempting to pad the nothing pict will not change the bounding box; the result is still nothing with width and height 0. When beside or stack is called on zero arguments (or with all nothing arguments), the result is nothing. When nothing is an argument to beside or stack alongside a non-0 value for ~sep, then no extra separator space is included at the place where nothing is provided.

The Pict.time_clip operation prunes an animated pict’s timeline by making it render as nothing outside of its time box. This can be useful, for example, to prevent a pict from participating in alignment calculations outside of its time box.