title: Issues with using unsupported Win32 GDI Pens modes?
body: <p>The MSDN <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535223(VS.85).aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">documentation</a> is (somewhat) clear about the following two facts about GDI Pens:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>A Cosmetic pen (create via CreatePen or ExtCreatePen w/ PS_COSMETIC) must be 1 <em>unit</em> wide  (well, &lt;= 1, but let's not go there).</p></li>
  <li><p><strike>A Geometric (ExtCreatePen w/ PS_GEOMETRIC) pen must solid (PS_SOLID only, no PS_DASH, etc). They can, however, draw fatter lines.</strike> <em>This is clearly documented in the link I put above as only a 9x restriction (I'm dumb). To my defense (bad) comments and (broken) logic in my code led me to believe otherwise. Some other googled articles must have been written concidering only Windows 9x.</em></p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p><strong>Why can I voilate these rules and have GDI happily draw with these Pens?</strong></p>
  
  <p>I can create fat (width = 10, for example) cosmetic pens <strong>and</strong> dashed Geometric pens. Heck, I can create a fat, dashed geometric pen!</p>
  
  <p>These Pens seem to work fine <em>usually</em>. The only problem I've seen is in Polyline when I pass very large arrays of points - it renders the lines very slowly. However, Polyline is acting strangely with large arrays in general - it justs acts differently with the <em>bad</em> pens. (my other polyline problems may be another question...)</p>
  
  <p><strong>Is it ever safe to use wide Cosmetic pens <strike>or wide Geometric with patterns?</strike></strong></p>